


The Statements of the Avatars

by Eldritch Entity (XAvariceX), XAvariceX



Category: Critical Role (Web Series), The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Blood and Gore, Gen, Horror, Just Horror, The Biggest Disaster Avatars You Ever Did See, no ships either, no update schedule
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-04
Updated: 2020-02-14
Packaged: 2021-01-22 11:36:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 24,914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21301415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/XAvariceX/pseuds/Eldritch%20Entity, https://archiveofourown.org/users/XAvariceX/pseuds/XAvariceX
Summary: The statements of several avatars, on how they lost their humanity, gained some power, and found some friends.
Comments: 15
Kudos: 162





	1. Statement of: Beauregard Lionett

**Author's Note:**

> Before I offer explanation, https://cary-atherton-art.tumblr.com/ made some brilliant art pieces of The Mighty Nein as Avatars of various entities, and they were a huge inspiration. Check her stuff out, it's extremely good and the designs are absolutely brilliant. The role of most characters in this fic are at least partially inspired by her work. This fic would not exist if I hadn't seen her au, and if you would give her a follow it would make me extremely happy. 
> 
> The world is a bit of a fusion between Exandria and The Magnus Archives. The setting is modern with Exandrian races and locations, so Port Dumali, Trostenwald, and similar places exist instead of real world locations. Orcs, Tieflings, Goblins, Halflings, and other Humanoids of the Fantastical variety are present in this world, but monsters are more of a folkloric thing. 
> 
> With that being said, enjoy the fic!

“Archivist? It’s good to see you back!”

Carmen Richardson looked up from her desk to see a familiar woman pushing open the glass doors to the Magnus Institute. A grey hoodie, sleeveless blue top, and black sweatpants were curious attire for an archivist, but then again, Beauregard Lionett wasn’t one for conventions. Piercings on her ears and eyebrows adorned her rather angular face, and the gold contrasted readily with clay-colored skin. 

“Good to be back Cammie.” The Head Archivist replied, her husky voice carrying well across the room as she walked up to Cammie’s desk to sign in. She signed her name in minute, messy handwriting, and under the section labeled reason for visit, she wrote pristinely picking up statements and research materials; recording statement.

“I hope your travels are going well? We miss you here at the institute.” Cammie said with a smile. She was lying. She missed Beau, finding her lack of tact very amusing. It was also rather refreshing, compared to many of the students and researchers who didn’t give her the time of day. Beau at least talked to her. 

Beau gave her a wry smirk. “Unfortunately, no. Still following up some leads on a statement I’m investigating. Maybe I should go up and say hello to The Gentleman though.” It was a weird nickname for the head of the institute, but it stuck because of his extremely polite demeanor. 

Cammie gave her a knowing look. While she hadn’t seen many of their interactions, but she knew that Beau and The Gentleman didn’t really get along well, as of late. Beau’s search for answers about The Magnus Institute and tendency to interrogate people roughly tended to rub certain people the wrong way. The Gentleman had to deal with the various disgruntled statement givers, archive staff, and even staff members of other departments. 

“He’s not in a great mood. I’d advise against it.” She said simply. 

“Fine. I’m just going to record my statement and head out again. Say hi to him for me.” She said as she walked down the stairs leading to the basement, where The Archives were housed. Cammie waved as Beau jogged down the stairs, striding easily through The Archives. 

She headed into the statement room, where there was a simple wooden table, a rather uncomfortable chair, and a tape recorder. Beau was quick to sit down and take the tape out of the recorder, and to reach into her cinch bag to pull out a box labeled in bold, capital letters: THE MIGHTY NEIN. She opened the box and took out a tape with her name on it. She put it into the recorder and pressed record, and began to speak. 

“Statement of Beauregard Lionett, Head Archivist of The Magnus Institute, regarding…” She trailed off for a moment. “How I became acquainted with The Eye.” The words were ominous and foreign on her tongue. She still didn’t quite know how to process the reality-sized revelations that came with knowledge of The Entities and how they operated. It had been a long few months, and she worried slightly about the state of her mind. “Statement recorded directly from subject. Statement begins.” She took a breath, then began to speak. 

“This whole situation started when I accepted my position as head archivist of The Magnus Institute. I was very surprised when The Gentleman offered me the position. I mean, I had been working here for about a month when Dairon went missing, and then she goes missing and I’m still in shock, and then my boss, head of the whole fuckin’ institute just offers me the position out of the blue. Dairon and I were…… not close, but I liked her. She taught me a lot. When he told me that she would’ve wanted me to have the position, I shrugged and signed up. 

The amount of bullshit I had to sort through and record was intense. I was library staff initially, and Dairon seemed super organized, but I came down here and it was like a tornado came through. Nothing was organized properly, all the statements were out of place, and the supposed digitization of the archives? Yeah that was a fucking lie. 

I started to work on digitizing the statements when the weird stuff started happening. Some of the statements just wouldn’t record digitally. About a quarter of the statements refused to record into any digital file format at all. Files would be corrupted, they would disappear, they would come out garbled and full of static, it was the weirdest thing. I dealt with this for about two weeks before I started using the tape recorders. They turned out fine. The tapes would play back alright, so I started organizing those statements based on what the statement givers described. The categories were very loose, but I thought I was doing alright. 

The statements that I had to get the tape recorder out for were different… Like, they were just more vivid than the others. It’s hard to describe, but they unsettled me a lot more than the other statements. 

The investigations into those statements were also weirder. Unexplained disappearances, strange deaths, and a general sense of foreboding accompanied those statements. My staff started to notice it too, Lucien in particular felt that something was deeply wrong. If I’d have just listened to him, maybe……. Maybe he’d still be alive. Well…… He is, but… 

Anyway, that's when the dreams started. I’d start to see the things I read out in the statements, except, I was there. Not experiencing any of the strange things that people talked about, but watching. I wasn’t even the focus of those dreams, it’s like my sense of self was… distorted somehow. Like I was scattered to the wind and only my sense of sight remained. The dreams were unusually vivid too, and I’ve never been a vivid dreamer. The details faded when I woke up, but I knew that I’d dreamed about the statements. It’s the strangest feeling, describing details that escape your mind, but I know that the dreams were more vivid than any I’ve had before. 

There’s one image that I remember in extreme detail though. The statement giver had described walking through a hall of mirrors, and ended up being lost there for hours as every time she thought she saw the exit, she bumped into a mirror that had just been reflecting it. She turned around to run to the exit that had been reflected by the mirror, and she ended up bumping into another mirror. She ended up walking in a circle, before looking below her to find that the floor was made of reflective glass as well. So was the ceiling. She knew the structure had a shape, but every time she thought she’d found a way out, it was just another reflection. Eventually, she fell asleep, and found herself several miles from the amusement park housing the hall of mirrors, sleeping in front of her bathroom mirror, with a bunch of missed texts from her friends asking where she’d gone. I watched all this happen, and I felt like I was positioned behind her, looking over her shoulder at the texts her friends were sending her. Then, I looked into her bathroom mirror. 

All I could see were two glowing eyes, levitating at the position where I would have been standing. I woke up covered in sweat, and breathing really heavily. 

I never shook that image out of my head. I was never quite able to stop myself from whirling around during some long days at the archive, as I couldn’t help but feel those piercing, glowing eyes looking at me. I never saw anything.  
I normally wouldn’t care. I’m used to having eyes on me. Dear old dad is rather famous, and being his daughter is the fuckin worst. He always wanted me to inherit the family business, and I was never quite straight-laced enough for that. Or straight at all, for that matter. 

The feeling of being watched here though… It was something else. I don’t know how to put it into words, but it was this omnipresent feeling that I couldn’t quite shake. Atmosphere and night terrors aside, I couldn’t quite complain. Then, everything began to fall apart. 

We were looking into a statement that unnerved me more than most. A particularly inspired designer began to make his designs more and more……. Minimalist. He got antsy about models wearing his clothes, culminating in a rather horrific runway test that ended in a nude mannequin walking the runway. The statement giver said that he would have thought it was a puppet or a robot or something, if not for the fact that it’s insides were on display in it’s open chest. There was nothing that could have made it move. The designer was never seen again, but the statement later found a jar labeled “UNWORKABLE” full of her teeth inside her workshop. 

Lucien was investigating this statement, and told me that he was going to head to the workshop to check things out, and that he would be back the next day. It was evening, and I ended up working late. After Lucien didn’t show up for about a week, I started to get worried. I walked over there myself during daytime, and asked to see the workshop myself. 

I was greeted by an assistant to the designer. Apparently, the workshop was now off limits, the building was being shut down. Everything had been cleared out. I would have just shrugged it off, but something about that assistant. His eyes looked exactly like Luciens, and they were reddened around the edges and… swollen. Like they were too big for his skull. Normally I would have pushed him further, but I just left. 

Lucien never showed up again. Not really. So naturally, I decided to take some time off. Clear my head. 

I took the next few days off of the archives, but it started to make me very sick. It felt like intense hunger, like spells of weakness. I didn’t know what to do, and when I went to my doctor, they were pretty alarmed to see that my muscles had atrophied. They asked me if I had been getting physical activity, and I told them I had. It didn’t stop until The Gentleman mailed me a statement that Dairon had wrote. Apparently it was the last one in the archives. I immediately felt better after I read the statement, and it was like I’d just taken some caffeine pills or something. I felt like I could run a marathon. I ended up only running a kilometer, because the feelings of dread made me want to just head back to my apartment and sleep. 

The last statement Dairon made told me a lot. I decided to head to Kraghammer, apparently it was where Dairon went, looking for some ancient library. I wanted to know what happened to her, and I’ve always liked a good treasure hunt. It took me about a day to find it, but it seemed like everyone there was pretty willing to speak to me in Common. They didn’t lie either. On my walk to the library, a man offered me directions. I told him to tell me what he really wanted and he said he wanted to mug me. He walked away looking really puzzled. 

It was only when someone complimented me on my pronunciation that I realized I’d been speaking Dwarvish the whole time. I don’t speak Dwarvish. 

When I got to the library, I spent several hours there looking for their books on the esoteric. I got frustrated pretty quickly, because I didn’t find anything, but Darion apparently had gone into the back of the library to look at their restricted sections. I was frustrated, I had grilled the Librarian for everything he knew, but he wasn’t willing to tell me shit. 

I don’t know what snapped inside me, if it was Lucien’s disappearance, following this breadcrumbs trail to a dead end, the fact that I could suddenly speak Dwarven, or the fact that suddenly people couldn’t help but tell me the truth, or maybe it was a combination of all of it. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that I put my fist through a bookcase, and was surprised that when the wood gave way, the space behind it was a torchlit stairway. 

I had shoved the bookcase aside and had begun to descend when the Librarian chased after me. I was still really angry, so I ended up throwing him against the stone wall and yelling at him for lying at me. He reached for something in his back pocket, and I panicked. It all happened really fast. I threw a punch for his chest, at the exact moment he ducked down, and screamed for him to tell me the truth. When my fist slammed into his throat, I heard a sickening crunch, and then a clack as his phone fell to the stone floor, followed by his body as he slumped to the ground. 

I backed against the opposite wall and started to flip out. I had just hurt this guy pretty badly. I covered my eyes and tried to calm down when I heard whispering. I looked up. The guy was whispering, every secret he had ever held, every lie he had ever told, through his crushed windpipe. His chest wasn’t moving to inhale or exhale though. I inched forward to check his pulse. His heart wasn’t beating either. 

The dead man was telling me the truth. 

I think I cried as I dragged him into the hidden library. By the time I had calmed down, I was looking around to see books, everywhere. I didn’t want to pull any of them out, I was too scared. I didn’t know what to do. I saw a door on the other wall and walked through it without thinking. 

What I saw in that room……. The walls were covered in eyes. Hieroglyphs of eyes, eyes that followed me when I moved. They shouldn’t have been able to move. It was ink on stone. I shook my head and stumbled forward. It couldn’t have been real. None of it could have been real. When I opened my eyes again, I was standing on another painted eye. A pupil black as the void, and an iris that was a luminescent purple. I looked up and I saw everything. 

The walls were gone. It was replaced by a bright sky, like the night sky in a place where light pollution didn’t exist. Except instead of stars, hundreds of thousands of eyes were watching me. I looked to the ground, and I was standing on a massive eye that was looking up at me, looking right through me, seeing everything that I was and would ever be. I understood. 

Beholding. 

I closed my eyes and I was back in that room, and I left. I knew what I had to do. The Archivist wasn’t a job title, it was who I was. The Eye was looking through me all along, and I would let my gaze pierce every mystery the world had ever seen.” 

Beau sat back, a satisfied smile on her face. It felt good to give a statement. She put the tape back in the box, and walked back up to the lobby, grabbing another box of statements on her way out. 

“Oh yeah. Cammie? Over the next few days some friends of mine are coming to give statements. They’re……. An interesting bunch. Let them through alright?” Beau said to the puzzled receptionist as she walked out of the building, eyes shining in the midday sun.


	2. Statement of: Jester Lavorre

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Statement of Jester Lavorre, Avatar of the Spiral on her communication with an entity that called itself 'The Traveler.'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, sorry that this is over a week later, I've been pretty busy. Anyway, here is Jester, and I'm going to be attempting to use some unorthodox writing techniques in her dialogue at the beginning to work with her personality. Let me know what you think of it! This chapter also reads a lot better if you imagine it in Jester's voice, I would recommend doing that haha. Anyway, here is the Chapter!

Cammie’s next few days were rather uneventful. After The Archivist left, she waited rather uneventfully for her friends to show up, the so called, “interesting bunch” that Beau had mentioned with that slight inflection of apprehension, like she didn’t know if her friends were going to come through the ceiling. Instead, one of them came through the janitors closet. 

When the door to the janitors closet opened to reveal a turquoise tiefling wearing a bright pink dress, Cammie stood up with a start. She started to speak, something along the lines of ‘why are you here’ or ‘what the fuck,’ but the tiefling was already standing in front of her desk with a wide smile. 

“Hi! I’m Jester. Beau’s friend.” She said, in a thick slavic accent that Cammie struggled to specifically place. She might have been from the Menag, but Cammie wasn’t good enough at linguistics to place it effectively. 

Jester was a hard person to describe. Whenever Cammie tried to focus on her features for longer than five seconds her vision got a bit blurry. It was a bit like double vision, how Jester’s features swam in and out of focus. She could see at least two Jesters whenever she focused, even though the rest of the room seemed well in focus. One of the Jesters she saw had strange, unnaturally long fingers, and swirling elusive eyes. Or was it both Jesters? She blinked, seeing an ordinary looking tiefling before her. 

“Hi. Could you sign in? And where did you come from ...” She asked trailing off as she started blinking more than usual to try and keep her vision from swimming whenever she looked forward at Jester. Had someone spiked her coffee? She stared at the cup on her desk, and her vision wasn’t swimming there, but looking up at Jester made her head hurt. 

Jester was writing her name down on the sign-in sheet, and spoke quickly while doing so. “I would say go look in the closet, but Beau told us not to feed off of you, she actually seemed rather fond of you, I guess she likes that you tolerate her being a bit more rough, not physically I mean, of course, you knew that, you know how Beau is, she’s nice but doesn’t understand how to be nice, right?” She didn’t really take a breath, despite speaking continuously; she spoke fast enough that Cammie had a hard time following her train of thought, but not so fast that she couldn’t understand what she was saying. 

Jester continued to speak. “Anyway you can look in the closet if you really want, I could send you to meet the Traveler, but I also like being friends with Beau, and she already isn’t super happy about how some of us need to eat, and I think she would be really unhappy if you disappeared. Like I said, she likes you” She started laughing incessantly, like something she said was really funny. 

Cammie stuttered, a bit concerned. “Are you okay ma’am?” 

Jester replied, completely seriously. “No, Mariam is my mother. I’m Jester.” 

A beat of silence passed and then she started laughing again. “Don’t worry, I’m fine. I know you meant to say ma’am. My mama thought that joke was hilarious. I should go see her sometime, she’s probably getting lonely without me.” She finished signing in and slid the clipboard back over the desk with a smile. 

“Do you need help findi~” Cammie started speaking but was distracted by her handwriting. It was… odd. Jester wrote in messy cursive, and her name, Jester Lavorre, was spelled out legibly, but something about the o in Lavorre was… unsettling. It was drawn in a regular spiral, except it didn’t seem to have a middle. It just seemed to continue endlessly and hurt Cammie’s eyes the longer she looked. When she looked up, Jester was gone. 

Cammie shook her head and figured that Beau had already told Jester what to do in order to give a statement. Still, something Jester had said unsettled her. “I would say look in the closet… Anyway, you can look in the closet.” Was it dangerous to look in there? Cammie believed in the supernatural, like ghosts and stuff, but Jester was real. At least, she was corporeal. She obviously wasn’t an illusion, even though her image swam in her eyes. She touched the pen and paper that Jester had used. Her name was still on the sign-in sheet, with the same hypnotic spiral for the o in Lavorre. She tore off the halfway filled out sign-in sheet and used a bit of white-out to cover the o, feeling unsettled. She grabbed a fresh sign-in sheet and put up the clipboard before heading towards the closet. 

Cammie really wanted to find out how Jester had gotten into the building. She had been sitting at her desk for an hour and she was fairly sure that, provided Jester hadn’t climbed through a window, there was no way for her to be in that closet. 

She crept forward and held the handle in her hand. It was cold metal, and she was still itching to find out how Jester actually got into the building. She closed her eyes and breathed in, preparing for whatever she might see inside the closet. She flung the door open and stared at… 

An ordinary janitors closet. She stepped in and looked around. No holes, no windows, cleaning products on the shelves, and no possible way into the building from the janitors closet. She shivered, something about this whole situation was wrong, and she had the feeling that this was only the beginning. 

Meanwhile, in the basement, Jester was skipping through the archives, ignoring the few people in the mostly deserted archives. She didn’t really say anything to them, just waved with the same grin on her face. 

She sauntered into the statement room, and grabbed the box from under the table with THE MIGHTY NEIN written on it. She grabbed the tape with her name on it and put it into the tape recorder, and hit record. 

“Hello.” She said with another jovial laugh, before shaking her head. “Right, Beau told me to say that I’m Jester Lavorre, and that I’m here to give a statement about my friend, The Traveler! Statement begins.” She smiled and started to speak. 

“I was born in Nicodranas to my mother, Mariam Lavorre, but most people call her the Ruby of the Sea. She’s a courtesan, so naturally when she had me, she had to keep me secret. It was nice in my room, all by myself, but it was pretty lonely. I mean, it was, until I met The Traveler.

He showed up when he stepped right through the door to my Mom’s suite. I was about six when he first showed up. I ran downstairs, expecting to see my mom walking through the door like normal, but instead, it was him… 

He was really tall. Taller than anyone I’ve ever seen before. I don’t think that I could say how tall he was, maybe eight feet? I don’t know, the point is, he was really, really tall okay? 

He wore a green cloak and all I could see under his hood was this wide grin. He seemed to be dashing away from someone, because he shut the door and stood against it like he had just slammed it on someone on the other end. I thought that he was one of my mom’s clients at first, so I asked him if he was lost. 

He looked back to me with surprise, or at least, I think it was surprise. I couldn’t see his eyes. He spoke in a weird tone, like his voice was being filtered, even though it obviously wasn’t. “I think I am. Sorry to bother you young lady, I think I took the wrong door……” He said as he opened the door again, and I saw what I would come to call the hall of mirrors. 

It definitely wasn’t the hotel that I knew as home, that was for sure. It was a multicolored corridor with tons of mirrors, like, more mirrors than I had ever seen, and I had been inside my mom’s closet, so I’ve seen a lot of mirrors before. 

I didn’t want him to leave though, I wanted to talk more with this stranger, so I grabbed his hand. His fingers were really long, but I didn’t think much of it at the time. I mean, my fingers are pretty long now, so it’s not that weird. 

Anyway, I took him up to my room and I set him a place at my little table, and we had a tea party. Usually when I poured from my little toy kettle, nothing came out, I just imagined it was tea, but this time, actual tea came out. It wasn’t too hot, and the tea was really good. I was talking to this strange man about my day, and about all the pictures I had drawn lately. 

He actually seemed really happy to join my tea party, and he told me he was an artist too. I was super excited and asked him if he had any of his pictures with him, and he said he would totally be willing to trade with me. I grabbed a notebook that I had been drawing in for the last couple of weeks, and he handed me a leather bound book that was only half filled. 

The pictures were the most beautiful things I had ever seen. There were colors and shapes that I had never even seen before. I flipped through them and he seemed puzzled. He said most people didn’t understand his drawings, and that I was very special. He told me to draw some stuff in that book and that he would be back sometime soon to see it. 

He left through the door from my art room, and I immediately tried to start drawing some of the shapes and using some of the colors that he had used in his notebook. 

I drew a picture of this odd looking flower for my mom in this color that I got by mixing black, white, grey and red paint that was almost blue, but a little red too. It wasn’t purple, in case you’re wondering.  
I don’t think my mom liked it at first. She tried to look at it closer and stared for a very long time, and ended up passing out. 

I thought it was scary or something and ended up getting down next to her and shaking her awake. I kept telling her it wasn’t that scary and that it was actually really nice. She didn’t wake up. 

I ended up falling asleep after trying to shake her awake for a few hours, when I woke up, she was gone. 

I looked around, trying to find her, and I eventually asked one of the people who does her hair where she was. The lady told me that she was out, getting me new paints. 

Waiting for her to get me new paints is always kind of stressful because I don’t want to paint. If I’m going to get a bunch of new colors later, it’s kind of hard to want to use all the boring colors now. I also noticed that the picture I had previously was now pinned on our fridge, I thought it grew on her. 

It turned out, I was right. When she got home, she got me a whole box of paints and told me she actually loved the picture. I drew more pictures, some of them were more normal and some of them were more spiraly and weird, but they were all super good. 

My mom loved my pictures after that, but she never seemed to get them. Whenever I would draw a corridor with a fractal instead of a door at the end she said she really liked the door at the end of the corridor and put it up on the fridge. 

I grew older and my visits with the traveler were always super nice. My mom never saw him, but that's alright. She seemed to think he was a good friend to me though. 

I started to get bored though, and I wanted to show more people some of my pictures. So, one time, while a man was with my mother, I put one of my pictures in his bag. 

I don’t know what he thought of it though. I thought that was a shame, I wanted to know what he thought of it. It was kind of sad that he ended up hanging himself. I read about it in the Nicodranas newspaper, apparently there was a bunch of torn up paper around his body. 

I didn’t do that again. The next time that the traveler came though, I told him about it and he laughed. He said that if I wanted to prank people, and the next time I wanted to prank someone I didn’t like, he had a better idea. 

He told me that he had been thinking about sharing some of his talents with me for a while. I thought he was talking about drawing, so I was super excited. He pulled his hood off and told me to look deep into his eyes. 

His eyes were the most beautiful shape I had ever seen, even in his drawings. They were like never ending spirals, but every line of the spiral was its own spiral and everything moved in a pattern that I suddenly understood. When he left, I felt super invigorated. 

I never felt hungry or thirsty for food after that. I still ate though, I will never give up the taste of donuts and lollipops, that would be crazy. I mean, they taste so good, I still buy them all the time. 

Anyway, it was about a week before my mom had a pretty mean client. He was super rude so I decided to prank him a bit. When he came out of my mom’s room, I said hello to him and asked if he wanted to see a magic trick. 

He said no and tried to ignore me, asking where the door was to get out. I told him that it was where the clothes closet is, and knocked on it when he was inside. It was super funny. I opened the door again to let him out and saw the hall of mirrors. I was super excited. Now it was an even better prank. I heard The Traveller whisper a laugh into my ear and I knew my prank, was legendary. 

I also felt really good after that. I was feeling tired that day and it was like I had just eaten an entire box of donuts but I wasn’t feeling sick. It was great. Eventually, I decided to let him out on the balcony and opened the door, and he walked out. 

About five steps after he got out he just collapsed, kind of like my mom did when she saw my picture. Only instead of waking up later, his body began to unravel in the same spirals that the traveler drew in his book. 

I thought my prank was pretty good, but apparently the town didn’t think so. They came to search my moms suite because he was apparently ‘murdered’ even though he was perfectly fine, just a bit more twisted than before. And dead. But he chose to be mean to The Traveler, and that was his fault. 

When they found me they were going to arrest me, but I ran into my art room and they really didn’t like the pictures there. My mama ran in, stepping over the guards who were drooling on the floor. She said that she didn’t think it was a good idea to live here anymore, because people didn’t really get my art and pranks and they would have a problem with me being here. 

I left through the hall of mirrors and started traveling ever since. I miss my Mama, but if it would be a problem for her if I lived there I didn’t want to trouble her. People also understand my art better now, no one collapses when I draw it, unless I draw something really crazy. I still send people to the hall of mirrors sometimes, of course, I need to eat. It makes me feel less tired whenever I do it, and people who are uptight need time to unravel sometimes. 

I’ve been on the road for two years now and it’s been super fun, I met some awesome friends and I’m having so much fun. The Traveller comes by sometimes to talk too, and he seems super proud of me. Statement ends.” 

Jester laughed and sat back. Beau was right, it was totally relaxing to give a statement, but she was kind of hungry. She put the tape back in the box and opened the door to the archives. She walked into the hall of mirrors, heading back to the hotel the Nein was staying at while they were all doing stuff in Zadash, figuring it was a good time to get a snack. 

“Donuts, and maybe an uptight businessman or two meeting the traveler.” She said with a smile as she skipped into the hall of mirrors happily.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you enjoyed that, let me know what you thought in the comments! Next chapter is coming soon, and it's going to be a bit.... claustrophobic.


	3. Statement of: Nott the Brave

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Statement of Veth Brenatto, on her unusual death and subsequent rebirth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was hard to write, and I suspect things will just get more and more intense from here on out. Enjoy!

Cammie idly watched the builders bring a new door for the janitors closet into the building, now equipped with a lock. After she had told The Gentleman about the incident with Jester Lavorre, he seemed to be not overly perturbed, but did have people check to make sure there was no possible way she could have gotten in from the outside. The room was totally sealed. 

He said that she probably just entered through a window or snuck in at some other point, and hid there for a while. Cammie was less than convinced by this explanation, but figured that she had to have entered somehow. 

She couldn’t have teleported. That was absurd. Still, something about Jester gave Cammie some really bad vibes. 

She wasn’t paying attention, so when someone rasped “Is this where we sign in?” Cammie fell out of her chair. Glancing from around her desk, with a great angle from the floor, she stared at a small goblin woman that she wouldn’t have been able to see from directly behind her desk. 

Normally, she could see shorter people arrive through the door, but she must have missed this one, probably because she was so lost in thought, staring at the builders working on the janitors closet. 

The goblin looked rather dusty, with a bit of dirt in her long black hair that fell almost to her ankles. She looked at her with eyes the color of sand, an uninterested look on her features. 

Cammie gave a sheepish smile to this woman and stood up to grab the clipboard from her desktop and hand it to the goblin, while stammering to try and explain herself. “Sorry, I was lost in thought. Not everyday you get the door to a Janitor’s closet replaced.” 

The goblin looked at her oddly, and didn’t take the clipboard. “What is this for?” 

Cammie blinked. “Uh. To sign in. To the institute. You write your name and the reason you’re here.” 

“Oh. What do you do if someone runs in the other direction? Like, do you pull out a crossbow and shoot them or something?” She asked, narrowing her eyes suspiciously at Cammie. “Because I’m really good at dodging and scuffling. You wouldn’t be able to hit me.” 

Cammie blinked again. “Uh. I can see that, with all the dust and stuff, but no, I don’t have a crossbow or anything.” She said with an eyebrow raised, not quite knowing how to respond. “I’ve… Never had anyone do that. I would probably just call my boss.” 

The goblin nodded slowly as she took the clipboard and signed her name. She only wrote her first name, Nott, with no last name. Cammie took the sign-in sheet as Nott started to walk towards the stairs to the basement. 

“Is this an alias? Because we’d prefer you use your real name. We promise confidentiality, but we may need to follow up on a statement.” 

Nott looked over her shoulder with a furrowed brow. “Ohhhh. Uh, my last name is Bren...” She stopped. “Breniantia.” She said, speaking very slowly. “B-R-E-N-A-N-T-I-A.” She spelled out, even slower than before. 

As she disappeared down into the archives, Cammie sighed and put the clipboard down on her desk. That was even more fake than before. She even misspelled the surname she said she had. She figured she wasn’t going to get anything out of Nott, so she just sat down and went back to working on a paper she was writing for the institute. 

Nott scuttled down to the statement room, being very careful to avoid the gaze of any of the archive staff. She had a way of blending into the walls, like the dark colors she was wearing just blended in with the earthy colors of the basement. 

As soon as Nott was inside the statement room, she opened the box and took out her tape, and put it in the recorder. She looked around suspiciously, and then darted under the table. It would but much harder for anyone to listen into her recording from down here. Of course, Beau had assured her that no one was listening in, everyone on her staff was cool, all that stuff. 

Not wasn’t buying it. Every shadow held someone that could take her things, or try and kill her. She wasn’t taking risks. She nestled herself under the table, hanging onto it, upside down, with her hands grabbing at the edges of the table. To anyone looking in the room, there was no one there, except for a slightly goblin shaped shadow under the table. 

She pressed record. Speaking softly, the goblin began her statement. “Statement of....” She looked around again, and lowered her voice even further, almost whispering into the tape recorder. “Veth Brenatto. Otherwise known as Nott the Brave. About… how I drowned. Statement recorded directly from subject. Statement begins.” 

“Okay, so, for the record, I prefer the dirt to the water. I’d rather suffocate than drown, although I suppose they’re really not all that different when you think about it. Honestly though, I don’t think either is possible for me anymore. 

So, I think this has more to do with my habit of collecting trinkets than anything else. After everything that happened, I suppose I probably should have stopped, but that’s like telling me to stop drinking. Sometimes, things are needed for basic function. I need two things. Trinkets and booze. 

I’ve always loved to pick stuff up. I was born in Felderwin, a small town on the edge of the empire. Growing up, I was always kind of weird, I liked to dig and hunt for trinkets, make jewelry out of them. Nothing that was stolen, not then. It was usually just buttons and beads and sometimes little coins. 

Most of the other kids in the village picked on me, and I didn’t have many friends. I mean, I don’t think I was all that weird, but my perspective as of now is a bit…… skewed towards excessive weirdness. Anyway, my husband was kind of strange too. 

We met in some stupid childrens game, and one thing led to another, and we were getting married after what felt like a few weeks of dating. I never dated anyone else, and neither did he. I think that we both knew that we were meant for each other. Soon after, when I was…… 24 I think? I had Luc. Everything seemed to be going perfectly for us. Then they showed up. 

They called themselves the Church of the Divine host. They mostly came to our town to preach their gospel, but apparently, in order to hear one of their sermons you had to do an interview or something. My husband and I weren’t religious, so we didn’t really pay them any mind. Most of them didn’t talk, and there were a few of them that didn’t wear the weird robes they had on. I think they were just hitching a ride, because they acted much more normal than the congregants. 

Every member of the church wore nothing but pure black robes, and outright refused to move around or do anything during the day. About an hour before the shops closed, they would buy things and usually wouldn’t say anything at all, just leave the money on the table and walk off. They didn’t buy anything weird, not really. A few times they even showed up to my husband’s pharmacy, getting typical over-the-counter drugs. 

I suppose I should probably clarify that my husband is a biochemist. He got his PhD about a year before he married me, finished the program in about half the time it normally takes. He’s a very intelligent man, and I loved watching him work. He was so clever…… I miss him a lot. 

I would help out in his lab. Especially when he had to mix drugs, because his hands were shaky and he would always forget where he put things. My hands are much steadier though, and I never forgot where anything was. We made quite the team, I helped him a lot with his doctoral thesis. He was way overqualified to be a pharmacist, but given that the university he worked for gave him enough of a grant for his research, he had more money than he could use to just build a lab. He also didn’t want to move, he liked it back home. So he built a pharmacy with a lab attached to it, and did his research while I took care of the finances and the more mundane chores. 

We ended up bringing in quite a bit of business to Felderwin, given that we were one of the few compounding pharmacies for a long way around. That meant we could make our own drugs on site, doctors would usually prescribe them to people who were allergic to very specific medication ingredients, so we could make more specific medications. 

So anyway, when the “priest” of the congregation, (And I’m using priest here because I don’t know what he was in their weird religion, other than a leader) asked for an extremely powerful “sleeping medication” with a suspicious looking doctors note, my husband was very, very intimidated. So he said yes. We were worried, so my husband prepared a sort of antidote in case someone overdosed on it, and went about our business. 

Nothing happened. Well, we didn’t think anything happened. They left about a week later, with a few converts to their name. At least, I thought that there were converts. I didn’t count, but a few people disappeared. We assumed they just converted and kind of left. 

So, a few days later, I was poking around the abandoned church they were practicing in. I found another one of my trinkets in there, but if I had just left everything alone…… Maybe I’d be able to see Yeza again. 

That old church was terrifying. The shadows seemed darker, and I always felt weird rushes of air, like something was sprinting behind me. That should have been a good enough reason to leave, but I was curious. 

In the middle of the church, there was this… pool. It was like a big puddle of black liquid. I don’t know how else to describe it. I almost didn’t notice it because despite the draftiness, it was perfectly still. I think I’d be dead if I fell into it. 

There was a stone sitting at the top of the pool. It was about the size of a marble, and was as black as night. I was just going to walk through the pool to pick it up, but I threw a rock into it to try and see how deep it was. Like I said, it looked more like a puddle than a pool, but that stone, which was the size of my fist, just sank under the blackness, and it didn’t even make a ripple. 

I was more curious than scared. Maybe it’s that curiosity that saved me in the end, maybe The Buried saw something in me. Either way, I just leaned over very carefully, snatched that marblelike thing, and filled a small vial with the black liquid to test it in the lab. 

My hand went into it, and it felt like sticking your hand into a freezer. It was colder than anything I’ve ever felt, and it had the same consistency as water. Honestly, it might as well have been ice cold water, except for the fact that it was totally opaque. 

I ran out of there pretty fast. I wasn’t fleeing, just creeped out. At least, I don’t think I was fleeing. I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. 

I took the stone and the liquid back to our laboratory to be analyzed. My husband was fascinated, it was seemingly a new isotope, maybe even a new element. It was harder to analyze the rock, because every time we tried to take a piece off, or look at it’s composition it just showed up as… Empty space. Like nothing was there. We couldn’t even see it through a basic electron microscope just pure blackness. 

The liquid was another story. That was what he thought was a new isotope, at first. He actually found that it was a stable compound. It was made up of a combination of organic and inorganic material. The organic material in it was spinal fluid and brain matter, and the inorganic material was partially mercury and partially the powerful tranquilizer we gave to the priest. This made no sense, especially because we gave them a tiny vial of tranquilizer, maybe half of what I had collected from that whole pool. We couldn’t figure out the color and why it was pitch black, but then again we only had a few hours to look at it. Then they showed up. 

The Church of the Divine Host. Technically, all the arson and ransacking that night was by weird people in masks and black robes. We all know who did it. And they knew that someone had whatever weird stone that had been formed. I don’t know how they knew, but I know that they knew. 

They didn’t even bother knocking on our door, they just broke it down and started throwing things around. They opened the cash register, took everything off the shelves, took out the drawers and threw it on the floor, they were messing everything up. 

We ended up hiding in a closet until we got a break, and when we got a chance to slip out the back we were running. Yeza had Luc with him, and I looked at him, holding my son and knew what I had to do. 

I had the stone and the had the vial. They were going to find us eventually, and they weren’t going to stop until they had what they were looking for. The way they ransacked the places in the town made it very clear they were trying to find something. 

I couldn’t give it to them. It was clear people had died to make whatever this was. The spinal fluid and brain matter inside it was evidence of that. Even worse, we had helped them do it. We knew the doctors note was faulty, and we both decided not to investigate. We were scared, and I don’t feel bad for being scared and reacting out of fear. 

I still felt guilty, and I knew what had to be done. I told Yeza to take Luc and run. He didn’t want to, but I didn’t give him much of a choice. I snatched the vial and pushed Luc into his arms, and began to run. He probably tried to follow, but he had our son. He couldn’t have caught up with me. I ran into that priest very quickly, and he looked… predatory. His eyes were as black as night, and I was terrified, so I threw the liquid in his face. 

I don’t think it killed him, but he was writhing on the ground with his hands over his eyes. His people grabbed me, and they dragged me to the river. They seemed to be more interested in punishing me in that moment, and that gave me time to pull the stone out. 

For a second, as I held the stone in front of me, everyone froze. Everyone’s eyes were on that stone as I threw it into the swirling rapids of the river. After that, it’s hard to remember. I was struck and beaten, almost to the level of unconsciousness. 

Then, I was cold. And wet. And drowning. They threw me into the rapids, and I think I died. I remember floating down to the bottom of the river, and the dirt and clay embraced me like an old friend. 

I washed up three months later about 300 miles downstream. In another river, not one that was connected to the river behind my home. I had been pulled through the earth, like it was more water to swim through. Even more eerily, that black stone was in my hand. 

Adjusting to my new life as a dead person has been strange. I walk, and talk, and I seem normal, but I don’t breathe, eat, sleep, anything. Well…… I feed on the fear of suffocation and drowning. Whatever saved me, Caleb called it The Buried. He knows a lot about these things. I still collect trinkets, but now it's either gems I find deep in the earth or interesting stuff that other people don't care enough to embrace. If you don't hold something tight, like the way the earth holds me, you don't care for it. I've learned that over my travels. 

I still think a lot about my son and husband. I want to go see them, but…… I can’t. The Dark wants its stone. And I’m not the woman I was. I’m not even a woman anymore, I’m…… I’m a monster. But I’m a monster who wants the best for them. I send my letters because I’m a monster who can’t let go, and I’ll always watch over them. Yeza taught Luc to swim a week ago. I watched. He would be eight now, and I miss him every day. But I can’t see him. I’m better off dead than this to him. But as long as he stays near the water, and keeps his feet on the warm dirt, he’ll be safe. I’ll keep my son safe.

Statement ends.” 

Nott wiped a tear from her eye, and then replaced the recorder and tape. She breathed in, and walked out of the institute, and straight into the river. 

About an hour later, Cammie came back from her lunch break and looked on her desk curiously. “Who took all my pens?!” She called as she charged upstairs to the library.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wooo! That was fun. Let me know who you want me to write next, or where you think I'm going to take other backstories in this AU. Until next time!


	4. Statement of: Mollymauk Tealeaf

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Statement of Mollymauk Tealeaf, regarding his rebirth and new life as an avatar of The Stranger.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a bit later than others, but this chapter was just kinda hard to write, I wanted to really get the Lucien/Mollymauk story right. I'm not sure I got it, but I certainly hope you enjoy it!

The day after Cammie spent her time after work getting a box of pens to replace all the ones she lost, she saw a ghost. Not a literal ghost, of course, but when he walked into the institute, Cammie almost teared up.

“Lucien?”

The purple tiefling walking into the archives and looking at her in confusion looked just like him. Lucien, the archival employee whom she had a brief relationship with, before his untimely disappearance three years ago. 

She got up out of her desk to hug him, and he looked shocked, before he kind of squirmed away and she got a better look at him. He was wearing a long coat that covered his arms, with rather extensive jewelry and decoration on his clothes in general. His horns had small, dangling pieces hanging from them, and they were rather pretty. 

He was actually rather attractive, like Lucien was. Sculpted features and purple skin that complimented his monochromatic red eyes rebounded off a slim sort of body type that fit him really well. 

It was how he felt that unnerved her. His skin wasn’t right. It looked like skin, it felt like skin, but underneath? It was rigid, not like flesh should be. It felt like it was pulled tight over some sort of plating, not like the fleshy feeling of muscle. 

When her arms overlapped his in the hug, they felt bumpy, like he had some sort of grooved plating beneath his coat. 

“Sorry? Darling, I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Mollymauk. Call me Molly.” 

That sound. That sound wasn’t Lucien. But it also wasn’t right for Mollymauk. She didn’t even know about Mollymauk, but she knew that his voice didn’t fit for his body. It sounded discordant and staccato, like it was forced through some sort of synthetic vocal filter to correct a chorus of voices and distill them into one single entity. 

“Molly.” She said, the name sounding foreign on her tongue. “I’m sorry, you look a lot like someone I used to know.” 

“I’m sorry about that. Must have one of those faces.” He said, looking at her, focused and unblinking. “Maybe it’s the horns.” He said with a sarcastic chuckle, which sounded uncomfortably like purring.

She didn’t like that look at all. It was like the tracking of a cat as it watched a bird outside the window. His eyes were glassy, they didn’t hold the emotion of normal eyes. They were just… a red sheen. Something was behind those eyes, but it wasn’t normal. They were alight, reflective, almost mirrorlike. She didn’t like seeing herself in his eyes, which in this case was all too literal as she could see her reflection in the glassy red surface of his eyes. 

“Right. Well, just sign yourself in, whatever you’re here for.” She said with a forced smile. 

He smiled back at her, gleaming, perfect teeth in his mouth. They glinted like that of a tiger. “You look lovely today by the way. Those earrings really accentuate your eyes.” He said as he wrote. 

His voice was kind, however, and some of that unease evaporated in Cammie’s mind. “Thanks, I picked them up yesterday while I was out shopping. Someone stole all my pens for some reason.” 

He smirked slightly. “Is that so? Sounds like a friend of mine. She's always snatching things.” He said with a fond smile.

As he was writing, she looked at his hand. It was moving on it’s own. Well, hands always did that. But his was moving like he didn’t have a forearm. He twisted at weird angles to move down the row he was writing in. His handwriting was as odd as his voice, almost printer-like in it’s precise cursive. 

She shivered. She didn’t like the way he moved. It wasn’t right. 

“Well for a building dedicated to researching the supernatural, there is a disappointing lack of wooden walls and suits of suspiciously silent suits of armor.” 

She laughed, and not because she felt like she had to. Sure, he was unnerving, but just from their passing interaction, he seemed to be rather charismatic. He also seemed to be pretty nice, without any sort of insincerity that made a lot of people that she would otherwise call nice completely insufferable to deal with.  
As he walked downstairs, she stared at his back, and how he was completely rigid as he walked. Like his legs moved, and they seemed to bend at the joint, but his back was completely straight, and she shivered. 

Probably just a normal guy making a statement, but she couldn’t quite shake the feeling of unease that he gave her. 

Mollymauk walked down into the archives with a smile, his long coat fluttering behind him as he walked. He felt a sense of deja vu as he did, like he had walked this way many times before. From what Beau told him, he probably had. 

When he got in the room to give a statement, he shut the blinds over the window so no one would see him, and took off his coat. 

His hands floated around him, comfortably being free from the confines of his coat. 

It was rather unsettling, how he had his arms grab onto each other in a long chain to emulate the appearance of human arms. His hands were only that, hands, with a bit of skin halfway up his forearm. Purple skin was stretched across the mannequin skeleton that made up his body, and in the case of his hands was stitched tightly onto the endoskeleton. 

There were eight of them in all, and as he got the tape recorder ready he used as many of them as he could. A few to grab and hold the box, one to grab the tape labeled “MOLLYMAUK” in bold, capital print, and used another hand to hold the tape recorder as he put the tape in the recorder. Lastly, a hand pressed record with a single purple digit. 

“Statement of Mollymauk Tealeaf, formerly known as Lucien, regarding my discovery of a life I used to life and how I was created. Statement recorded directly from subject. Statement begins.

I don’t quite know how to begin this story. I’m not uncomfortable, being what I am. An avatar of the stranger, destined to forever feed off of human fear and the like. I don’t mind it, some people just need to die. 

But I don’t think it’s quite fair to say that I always felt completely at ease with what I was either.  
My earliest memories were clawing my way out of a grave, ravenous and searching desperately for food. I found it in the gravekeeper who was sitting outside, and he became my first feeding. 

I don’t know why after I was built that I was placed in a grave, but I think it was because my fellows, born of the stranger, needed somewhere to store me while my consciousness grew to be fully formed. 

Back then, I was rather incomplete. I didn’t have legs, I simply floated along like a ghost, or like my arms do. It didn’t bother me much though, I served my purpose well. 

I simply received impulses of who I was to follow and kill, and I did what was required of me. Back then, I was simply a mannequin, with a rather standard form and white body. I think what made me different is that my mannequin form was made out of pure bone. I think that’s why I’m me. Why I don’t just exist for the thrill of feeding. 

The only thing about me that was odd was my head, unlike the eyeless mannequins that are a bit more “regular” I guess. I had these red buttons for eyes that were stitched on. 

Actually, I still have these eyes, but I usually wear these lenses over them. People would know that I’m not… like them. I’m still a person, but no one would see that. 

Anyway, I just got these mental pictures of who I was meant to kill and feed off of. The thing about mannequins, even now, is that I can be completely still and I think people just completely ignore me unconsciously. 

It’s not a full ignorance though, the thing about mannequins is that you always feel like they’re watching you. Maybe that’s why Beau and I could basically be siblings. We really aren’t that different. 

The fear that’s created by someone who keeps seeing the same mannequin over and over again is delicious. Especially when moving in for the kill. 

I was like that for a while. I don’t really remember feeling much other than hunger and satisfaction. I think the people I fed off of were bad people, but then again, I’m sure a lot of people would call me a bad… thing. So I’m probably wrong. 

It all changed after one of my later meals. I was in between hunts, so I usually just kind of stood still and went almost dormant. I remember waking up from a sort of sleep, and there was this really young girl looking at me very close. 

I guess I was in a toy store, I had been moved, and I didn’t really know where I was at first, but I had been dressed in a really gaudy circus outfit. I think I was just meant to showcase a costume, but this girl was adamant on buying me as a doll or something. 

Her parents tried to convince her otherwise, it wasn’t like I was on sale, but the store owners thought I was creepy and wanted to get rid of me, and this girl was insisting on it. 

So, they brought me home, and she kept me in her room. I learned pretty quickly that this girl wasn’t regular either. She had really bad night terrors, and she was always terrified to go to sleep. 

I quickly learned why. When she would sleep, this creature would come into the house. It just walked in, through the doors, through the walls, and there was nothing she could do to stop it. She was being hunted, this thing was feeding off of her. 

It looked almost human, but it had no mouth or nasal openings. It also had this nasty looking knife that… didn’t pierce. It reshuffled things. Reawakened past trauma. I think her scars came from The Slaughter, she talked about her home being consumed with fighting over a red gemstone. 

Either way, whenever she would sleep and be at peace, this wraith would come for her. It stabbed her with these spectral knives and she would scream and twist in her dreams, and it would be sated, and it would leave. Sometimes, she would wake up and see it, and before she could actually run or move, it would pounce and send her back into her memories with that knife. 

When I saw it for the first time, I tried to ignore it. She wasn’t my mark, I was just waiting for a mark to come. It ignored me, like almost everything else did. But over time, I couldn’t listen to her keep screaming with pain as this thing hunted her for her past, a past she had no control over. 

So, while her foster parents were sleeping, I had some of my hands go down to the kitchen and grab a few knives. When that thing came for her, I tackled it, and we fought. I wounded it, but it ended up getting away. In that moment, I felt something other than being sated or hungry. I felt happy. 

I returned to my position, and she was looking at me. She thanked me, even though I didn’t move. I wanted to say that it was no trouble, and that she deserved to be happy, but I didn’t have vocal chords, or a tongue to speak. 

That day, while I was idle and unmoving, I started to get flashes. Flashes of my skin being peeled, my eyes being plucked out, my voice and tongue being taken, and my horns being sawed off. 

My bones were still mine, reshaped as they were. Melted down and recast, but they were mine. But they had taken from me. My mind and body was gone, and those mannequin fucks had taken them. 

So, I started hunting it down. My tongue and vocal cords were first. I went outside when I was sure that the girl who bought me wasn’t going to be attacked that night. I found this man, he had my tongue. I think all the mannequins that had killed and remade me were using me to pose as humans for their own feeding purposes. 

I don’t know how I knew where the parts of me were, but it was a lot like my previous cravings for fear. I think that might had been implicit approval of The Stranger, but it didn’t matter. They had taken what was mine. 

When I had my tongue and vocal chords, the next time that thing came for the girl that bought me, I was able to talk to her. Her name was Kiri, and she told me about how her family and friends died. The Slaughter claimed them, and when she hugged me, it was that feeling of happiness again. 

The memories were back again though, and I continued to remember my old life. I didn’t know my name, but I remembered getting a tattoo of a peacock. 

Over the next couple of months, I was hunting down and stitching my skin onto my skeleton. It was hard work, but I got it all done. I had to cut parts of it to fit my new form, but it managed to stretch enough to fit over my new form. 

By this time, Kiri was staying up later than she probably should have, having tea parties and playing with me. I kept an eye on her, made sure she was safe, and she helped me find who I was. 

It took a long time, hunting all of it down. I had to use some gold piercings and stitches to get all my body parts back on, and I wasn’t fully able to become normal again, but… I don’t know. Protecting Kiri and getting what was mine back made me feel like a person.

Eventually, her parents started to notice that her mannequin had changed in color, suddenly had a mouth, horns, hair, and various gold ornaments. She said she was doing it herself, but after the hair, they were a bit concerned. 

They were going to get rid of me, and I was angry about that. I wanted to stab them, carve them up into small pieces for trying to take her out of my watch, but I think that probably would have traumatized her. 

I wanted to make sure she was safe, so I went back to the den of those things that haunted her, and I took them and I killed them all. I made it hurt, I carved them up and I butchered them, and I enjoyed every second of it. They were disgusting creatures that hurt my Kiri. And they deserved to die, their pained, soundless screams were music to my ears. 

When I finished making sure no one would hurt her again, my memories changed from moments to memories. 

I remembered being an archival assistant here, I remembered vaguely who used to work here. I remembered going to that warehouse to investigate the designer who’s assistant had given a statement. 

I remembered squeezing into the warehouse through an open window to look around. I remembered finding that jar of teeth, and I knew what had happened. 

But by then, it was too late for me to run. They were closing in, and they unmade me. 

I still go to see Kiri, whenever I can. Make sure she’s alright, and that she doesn’t need protecting. 

I go out and I try to be a person, but I don’t know how capable of being normal I really can be anymore. Maybe I wasn’t meant to live a normal life, maybe it just wasn’t in the cards. 

I guess you just have to make the best of things, right?” 

He probably would have been crying, if buttons for eyes could produce tears. 

He sighed and put everything back, closing the lid on the box and putting it back under the table. 

After he put his coat back on and walked out, he spent a bit of time walking through the archives. 

He remembered the feeling of the wood bookcases with the written statements on them, he remembered investigating several of them, and smiled as he reminisced. 

Lucien was gone though. As he walked out of the institute, he knew that there was nothing left of the man whose skin he wore. It may have been his, Mollymauk’s body was his own, and while Lucien was gone, he was there in his place. 

He didn’t really know who he was. There was an element of needing to rebuild himself, just as he had rebuilt himself previously, just now in persona rather than body. 

With the friends he had though, he was willing to try and figure it out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one was a bit happier than previous statements. Don't worry, we'll get back to agnst next time! Follow me on tumblr (https://eldritchenvironment.tumblr.com/) and feel free to send me comments, asks, and messages about it, they always make my day!


	5. Statement of: Yasha Nydoorin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Statement of: Yasha Nydoorin, regarding her life and the loss of her wife.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this was hard to write, but I am back and hope to get the next three chapters done ASAP. This one is a bit short, but that is to be expected from an Avatar of the Lonely. 
> 
> I am going to add a slight content warning for grief and depression, this chapter does touch on it.

Two days after the man who looked like Lucien but was not Lucien walked into the institute, Cammie walked into the institute from her lunch break holding a cup of warm coffee and an umbrella. It still hurt, looking into Mollymauk’s eyes and hearing him tell her “Darling, I don’t think we’ve met.” I do not know you. He was somebody that she used to know. She was sure of it. She was also sure that with the last three weird guests to the archives, that she was slowly losing her grip on reality. 

When she saw the tall, pale woman standing idly at her desk, staring at the wall, she knew that she was having another one of those days. She froze, despite the cold rain that her umbrella barely kept at bay, and closed her eyes. Then the woman looked over her shoulder at her. She shouldn’t have known that, her eyes were closed, but Cammie knew the moment when everything shifted. When she opened her eyes, they were locked with this strange woman, and she knew that she had been captured in the fleeting feeling of a moment. 

The rain seemed like it was pouring down even more heavily, loud enough to drown out any sounds of people walking behind her. The water fell from the sky to the ground, and it was so cold that it forced the people below it into their homes and into their coats, where they were warm, safe, and alone. 

As she started walking to her desk, every step felt more and more ineffective, like she was walking on a treadmill. This was who she was and what she did. She was nothing more than a glorified roadblock to a search for information. 

She could speak, interact, scream, or die at her desk, and her function wouldn’t change. People would write their names, maybe say a few passing words, and forget she even existed. 

She shook her head as she sat down, and the moment seemed to pass. She realized she had looked down to hand this woman a pen, and as she wasn’t staring into her eyes, she felt much more… present. 

Presence was an odd thing. Especially when this woman who was standing before her was barely present at all. Dark hair that was white at the ends, pale skin, and empty eyes. She may as well have been a phantom.

Empty eyes. 

Cammie almost jumped as she put the pen on the top of her desk, a few millimeters from the edge of the clipboard, for the woman to sign. She didn’t need to be told what to do. Cammie didn’t want to look into those empty eyes.

That was the thing. Cammie had a very good memory, she could remember faces and appearances very well. 

She couldn’t remember how the woman’s eyes looked. It wasn’t the hazy sort of memory that she felt about Jester, where all her edges were blurry and her eyes were spinning. She knew Jester was a blue tiefling with blue eyes.   
The woman before her didn’t have anything but emptiness in her eyes. No color, no dimensionality, not even deadness. Just emptiness. The sheer lack of presence at all, even if she knew this woman was physically there. 

The scratching of the pen to the paper told her that much. This woman wasn’t a ghost or a hallucination, she was real, and she thought, and moved, and talked, and saw, and heard, but Cammie knew that she didn’t exist like she did. She distinctly knew that looking up wasn’t worth it. If she had never seen her from the outside of the archives on her lunch break, she probably would have just put the pen up on her desk without thinking, and blocked out any knowledge that this woman was even there. 

Just don’t think of what isn’t really there. Don’t think of what exists on the margins of existence. Don’t think about it, and it can’t hurt you. Don’t think about the sea of people and how utterly alone you truly are, and you will never feel lonely. 

Don’t think, don’t see. 

Some things aren’t supposed to be thought of anyway. 

As Yasha finished putting her solitary first name on the paper, she descended into the archives. Her footsteps made no sound, no one paid her any mind. Despite her size, she was so incredibly small as she walked through the doorways and sat at the table for giving statements. 

As she delicately pulled out the tape recorder and clicked the button to turn it on, she gave a very slight exhale outwards, the first sign of life, proving that she was only slightly more alive than the flower she had picked about three hours ago, wilting away in her jacket pocket. 

As she put the tape into the recorder, and started to speak, she wished that the woman at the reception desk had said something to her. Hadn’t looked into her eyes. She was pretty. Maybe Yasha could have given her a flower. 

“Statement of Yasha Nyoodrin. Regarding my early life, the death of my wife, and what took her place afterwards.” 

Yasha breathed out slowly. It was easier to talk here. Not quite like how it was easier to talk when she was with her friends, but it was a similar feeling. It would have been unnerving, but she felt… oddly at ease. She knew she was alone, but she knew she was being observed as well. It was comforting in a disconcerting way, all the comfort of isolation with none of the loneliness. 

“Statement begins.

Loss is a funny thing. You never really understand it until you experience it, and you always think it can’t possibly get worse, until you lose someone who’s even closer to you. 

I knew loss pretty early on. I grew up in Xhorhas, which wasn’t a pleasant experience. I never met my father, and my mother died when I was very young. My family was more of a loose group of raiders, we pillaged and fought for the glory of Fury, which we served with delight. 

I suppose it wasn’t much of a childhood, serving that infernal rage in a whirlwind of blood and pain. I didn’t really get the chance to be a child, and in some ways I’m still stuck in that naive state of mind. 

I was always favored by Fury. The fervor we worshipped kept me going when Terminus was curling it’s cold black hands around my heart. Fury still watches over me and grants me it’s gifts, but I think that it was never intended for me to take up it’s full boiling rage. 

Not that anyone in my family knew that. They treated me as some sort of chosen one, even though most of my moments of near death were wrought by bad decisions rather than glorious rage. 

Rose-tinted glasses will do a lot, especially to a group of people that were already looking for a messiah. They looked to me like I was just one show of force away from leading them, and I think that after a few years of nothing they started to get tired of waiting. 

So, after those few years of waiting, the time came for me to take a mate. That was a tradition within our tribe, if you lived long enough, you were fit for companionship and reproduction. That’s it. Maybe that’s why the Fury never bothered giving our little raiding party any of its blessings. From what I now understand, rage and love are simply an octave apart. 

I fell in love with her to the sound of clashing steel and spraying blood, but in her gaze it was all sweet music to me. 

We married, privately, where no one would see us. I think it was at that moment that I was truly happy, and something about the world decided that it would never happen again. 

They killed her. 

I want to say I remember it vividly, but I can’t. It comes to me in flashes, late at night when I feel at my most isolated.

A battle hard-fought, a kiss hard-earned. 

Spying eyes and grievances raised. 

Shoving and tugging, blades from sheathes.

A cut across her throat, and an ocean of blood.

As the ocean poured from her throat, an ocean of screams surged from mine. 

Then I ran. 

After that, it was a blur. I wandered the streets of abandoned cities at night alone, letting my pain and grief simmer and boil. This fury was different from the one I knew before. It was quiet, and it did not kill quickly. It held its victims and lulled them to sleep with a hypnotic lullaby. 

Before long, the world was fading into various shades of gray, and my wandering became more and more isolated. It’s hard to even remember that time, or how I traveled across continents, fading in and out of the world. 

I found that I was always alone, even surrounded by people, and that when that Quiet eclipsed me, people were rightfully afraid. 

I think it was the fact that Mollymauk knew loneliness that made him so endearing to me. He knew what it was to be alone, to be cut off completely, and yet he was not eclipsed by the same Quiet. Maybe it’s a special kind of Quiet that pulled me into its freezing embrace. Either way, my current friends all know that loneliness, and something about that keeps me attached to them. 

I think it’s a hope that they will understand and empathize, that keeps me with them. 

And I think that hope helped me to pull strength from that Quiet. It still aches, but I don’t hate what I am now. It’s possible to be within that Quiet and still hear the sounds of my companions, and something about that keeps me satisfied. 

I forgot their names, the ones who took her from me. 

I fear one day I will forget her name too. 

So I collect the only color left in my world, the flowers she loved so much. 

I collect them so her smile stays in my mind. 

Zuala.” 

And she was gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, comments and messages here or on tumblr fuel my enthusiasm to continue writing, so it would be very appreciated. Until next time.


	6. Statement of: Caduceus Clay

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Statement of: Caduceus Clay, regarding life, death, and rebirth. Plus his garden.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I update once in a blue moon, so sorry to anyone I've kept waiting. I think floral tea goes very well with this episode! 
> 
> Content warning at the end, It is a bit of a spoiler.

Cammie was thinking about resigning. This whole place was not good for her, she was losing her grip on reality. A tiefling from an internal door and a goblin covered in dust didn’t bother her, but the last two people coming in for statements greatly bothered her. Lucien had mattered to her, and seeing someone who wore his face unsettled her. The pale woman did something to her as well. She had never felt so messed up by a single glance. 

She was pondering over what Beau had gotten herself involved in. Beau seemed normal and fine, but the ‘friends’ who had started to come in to give statements were far from normal. Weird people came into the institute all the time, but she wasn’t ever afraid of them. 

She ran a hand through her hair and looked at the partial reflection of her face in her computer screen. She got the feeling someone was watching her, and then looked at the ceiling. The security cameras, of course, gave her that feeling. 

Before, the cameras watching made her feel safe, now, it was much more sinister. 

However, all thoughts of cameras watching ceased when the tall firbolg with pink hair walked in. 

He smelled odd. Like fresh rain and morning dew, or like mist coiling around gravestones in the morning. He wore a hoodie and his eyes were almost sleepy, but he was just awake enough to give her the impression that he wasn’t missing sleep or anything. 

He stood with his back slightly slouched, and walked nonchalantly. Nothing would have been abnormal, aside from the path that he took. He seemed to be avoiding some invisible objects, even stepping over a place on the floor as if he was stepping over a hurdle. 

“Hello.” He said to Cammie, cheerfully and as if nothing strange was going on at all. This guy seemed much more normal than the others who had been coming in as of late, and she was relieved to hand him the clipboard to sign in. 

“Can I ask you to deliver something to The Gentleman for me?” 

“Sure.” 

“Be careful with it, I grew it myself.” The man said as he signed in, then walked back outside, presumably to his car. He returned with a medium sized flower pot, about the size of a basketball, and one of the most beautiful flowering plants she had ever seen. 

They looked like lillies, the flowers pure white with vibrant crimson red streaking through the middle of each petal. The branches were thorny, with small grey spikes protruding from three thick, branching grey stems that grew more vertically than out. It had been pruned well, as those stems were the only two and they twined together in a tight embrace. They smelled quite pleasant, even if she couldn’t quite place the scent. 

Written in cursive on the side of the pot, probably in permanent marker, were the words, ‘My sincerest gratitude.’ There was also a card that he placed next to the plant, with ‘For The Gentleman’ written in the same loopy, radial script. 

The handwriting certainly matched the name on the clipboard. Caduceus Clay. It was beautiful, in it’s own irreverent way. 

“Don’t touch the plant, and don’t drop the pot. The clay is rather thin, and the plant dies rather easily. It is a perennial, but getting it back into fertile environments and growing it again is rather time consuming. Make sure it stays healthy.” 

Cammie was half-listening. Did The Gentleman have a boyfriend? Husband? He certainly seemed rich enough, the institute got good funding and he always dressed well, but this gift seemed, oddly out of place. Flowers the colors of valentines were too intimate a gift to give someone as a thank you. Whatever, this man didn’t bother her like the last couple of statement givers, so she didn’t care. She also wanted to know what that smell reminded her of. What kind of flower smelled like this? It looked like a lilly, but Lillies weren’t quite as acrid, even if the sweetness was still there. 

“I’ll bring some water up with it.” She said to him, her focus drifting back. 

“Why?” He asked.

The conversation ebbed from that point, as Caduceus began to talk about how the weather today would be great for tea, and Cammie found his trail of thought rather hard to follow. 

As she grabbed the pot and note, Mr. Clay walked towards the stairs to the basement archives. 

Caduceus stepped through the icy tendrils that encircled the building. This place was hardly untouched by the collection of vines that he knew very well. He normally prefered to step over them, even if he could make them shift and move if he wanted to. 

The poor girl seemed so unaware of the way they snaked around her, how they embraced her as quietly as the flowers embraced each other. He was rather proud of that plant, it had been difficult to grow. Then again, normally his flowers were less picky about their conditions. 

He walked into the statement room and sat in the chair feeling rather comfortable as the tendrils snaked around his body. It was almost loving, the way the inky blackness crept over his cool skin, lightly brushing over his fur. 

He grabbed the tape with his name on it and placed it into the recorder calmly, and began to speak.  
“Statement of Caduceus Clay, regarding life, death, and rebirth. And my garden. Statement begins.

I was born into a large family of gravediggers who were in service of The Great Swarm. It really wasn’t as bad as you would think, I’ve found that many have distaste for insects and the power associated with them, but they are, in my experience, not unpleasant. 

Granted, my family, and myself when I was younger I suppose; we never really served in a way that most find disgusting, or even threatening. I think that’s because most people don’t see locusts and ants as dangerous because the worst they do is eat plants people don’t want them to. Of course, when the swarm is under the sway of a focused mind, they can be quite dangerous, but I never had any affinity for them. 

Instead, I always felt drawn to the trees and the plants. I always found them to be better company. Insects are loud and quick to aggression, but flora? Plants are patient, plants are quiet, and yet plants are the most important form of life. 

To be honest, plants aren't as alive as most people say. A bunch of them die only to be reborn the following season. A massive amount of a plant's water transportation system is a tube of dead cells that water climbs up to nourish the rest of the plant. 

Plants are also born dead. Their seeds can survive the harshest conditions, and then be placed in the ground for them to rise again. Even then, the ground they need is often fertile soil, which itself becomes more fertile as the decomposing creatures provide their nutrients back to the earth. What insect swarm could compare to the spectacular deaths of plants? 

I always spent time in the quiet peace of the graveyard. I planted on the graves of those who were buried, and I always found that butterflies and moths took a particular liking to me. They still do, I think, just a way that The Great Swarm reminds me that I’m still tied to it, even if the butterflies and moths go through their own death when they grow their wings inside their cocoons. 

My family left to pursue their Swarm, so I stayed home to tend to the graves. It was then, when the swarms were all gone, that I started to see the vines. 

They came from below, from the graves and they wrapped around people that came. People have come to us for burial for centuries now, but I could never see how corporeal the experience of death was, as the vines would circle around their feet and enshroud them. A few times, some very old people came and I could see how the vines touched their skin, and then their children would come in a few weeks later for another burial. 

I was scared, I think. Especially when those vines of ice started to embrace me in my sleep. I would wake up with them curled around my limbs like I was a stone wall to be covered in ivy. At the time, I knew there were other forces, but all I had ever known was the Swarm, even though it barely knew me. The vines were different. Slow, patient, and quiet. 

I didn’t know what I was to do, why the vines held me so. They never impeded my movement, but every day I could feel their icy silhouette against my skin, crawling closer and closer to my heart. 

Things changed when I met them. 

I didn’t know there were more people like me. My family never had the connection with the swarm that I did with the vines, they were more servants than active channelers of the great power in the Hive. 

So when I met a small goblin woman that the ground swallowed and drowned, only to bring her back up and man with hair as red as the burning he caused with a touch, I knew I couldn’t stay. I wanted to follow them, to see where their paths would travel. They had recently lost a friend, one who I think already gave his story earlier, but from the way they spoke of his disappearance, I knew he was going to show up again. I wanted to find the heart of the vines, and I figured they would be able to lead me in that direction. 

They were going through some rather rough times, with friends kidnapped and dead, so I wanted to help. I didn’t know it would lead me to my death, although I’m glad I was able to get the opportunity. We ended up dealing with those who kidnapped our other friends, and that was when Caleb embraced his own power. I’m sure he’ll talk about it when he comes here, but needless to say, our little group survived that whole fight. What surprised me the most is how I was able to help. When the vines began to coil closer to my new allies, I was able to push them towards other threats. It wasn’t as much control, as it was a response. The biggest shock to me was when I impaled a man with one. No one else could see at that point, the pointed vine I directed into his stomach, but when he began to bleed it was clear that I was capable of far more than simply seeing death. 

I suppose it was ironic that my own death was more chaotic than carefully arranged. At that point, I sank beneath the earth and I met The Heart of the Vines, pumping it’s great nothingness into the world around it. I suppose I could have chosen to simply pass as an ordinary man would, but I am no ordinary man I suppose. I let my heart beat in time with the pulsing vines, and I rose the following morning from the restless sleep of death. 

Since then, things have been odd for me. Those vines are my lifeline now, and sometimes even regular people can see them, if I focus on it. I’m still afraid, at least a little, there are things in the world that bring a freezing chill deep into my bones. 

My gardening still brings me comfort though. Some of the plants that I grow are a little different now, but change is hardly a bad thing. They sing songs for me now, even if no one else can really hear. 

The plants have taken a liking to some members of our group, they’ve grown protective even. Last week, I was out and my garden grew without me. I think a few hunters sought to burn it down as an act of revenge against us. I’ve never seen a tree grow up inside a person before, but by the time I had returned the garden was embroiled in their silent song, providing an excellent background harmony to the melody of screaming hunters. 

The Heart of the Vines beats within me now. I can feel it, pumping the ice through my veins. I never quite understood how my family could live for the swarm, because no matter how they live, they will die for The Great Heart. All will fall to the ground, and when they do, the half lives of the flora will begin.

Statement ends.” 

Caduceus Clay stood up and strolled rather leisurely out of the institute. He felt oddly at ease. No one was truly beyond death, even him, but there was a certain beauty in the way that life and death were intertwined. To see it, all he had to do was wait.  
Cammie listened to Caduceus’s instructions carefully, and she placed the oddly heavy vase on his desk. When she pulled her hand away, it caught on a thorn and drew a fair bit of blood. 

“Agh.” She breathed out, the small exclamation of pain escaping her lips as she annoyedly looked for a band-aid in the spacious office. As she was looking at it, she noticed how easily the blood sank into the soil in the pot remarkably fast. 

“Is my blood thinning or something?” She said as she went to inspect the plant a bit closer, trying to see if the soil was less dense than usual. As she moved the soil around, she noticed a small vein of crimson color on one of the flowers. Then another. And another. Slowly, the vibrant crimson red that barely streaked through the middle of each flower became a little more pronounced, and Cammie paled as she saw it. 

Then, her hand hit a solid object. At first, she thought it was a root, because it was where the root for one of the stems would have been, but it was more yielding than that, like the texture of rotting fruit. She pulled some of the dirt aside and saw peach colored flesh, sloping inward like….

Like an eye socket. 

She jumped fairly obviously as a voice behind her spoke, a voice she had heard many times before. Babenon Dosal, called The Gentleman by much of the Institute staff, a nickname he hardly had an issue with, mainly because it was a tongue and cheek reference to his fondness for fancy suits and posh demeanor and vocal tambour. 

“I see Mr. Clay’s gift has arrived.” He said calmly as he walked past her, plucking the letter from off the table. 

“Yeah…” She said, lost in thought as she stared at the flower. Was it always pointed towards her? 

“Careful. It’s sharp.” She said slowly, looking at him, slowly beginning to put several pieces together. She was starting to place that smell. It smelled like Iron. 

“I know.” He said smoothly, as he read the note. “Makes for some excellent tea, even if it tastes a bit metallic.” He said with a slight smirk, and a piercing glance into Cammie’s eyes. 

“Have a good day sir.” She said quickly as she swallowed and walked out. It was time to get those resignation forms filled out. Her time here was coming to an end.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Warning: Blood, Gore, and Death. 
> 
> As always, comments and reblogs on my tumblr will get me to write faster, they tend to spark inspiration for me. Let me know what you thought of this chapter!
> 
> Also, the incredibly talented https://cary-atherton-art.tumblr.com/ (The incredible artist who first inspired me to write this crossover) was so cool to contribute a drawing of Caduceus's flower, which I have called the Sanguis Augures. The link to the post is here, the detail is amazing and I gasped when I saw it, it nails the balance between unnerving and beautiful that I was going for and the flower looks excellent. Here is a link to the post https://cary-atherton-art.tumblr.com/post/190668538260/the-statements-of-the-avatars-chapter-6. Check it out, and make sure to click it to enlarge the image.


	7. Statement of: Caleb Widogast

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Statement of Caleb Widogast, Regarding his experiences with the Blackened Earth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so read the content warnings if you are squeamish. Other than that, enjoy!

The resignation letter was always arduous and long, and Cammie’s fingers moved sluggishly across the keyboard as she thought of how to be as kind as possible in her resignation. She didn’t dislike anyone here, but this place was becoming unbearable. 

She was trying to convince herself that the pursuit of the supernatural was foolish, like everything had a rational explanation, but she knew she was lying. Every time she looked in the mirror to say something like “You were imagining it,” or “You didn’t get a close enough look,” she could feel the heat rising in her chest, like it always did when she lied. 

Still, plants couldn’t drink blood. She knew that for certain. 

As she finished the letter, she sighed, like a weight of relief was off her chest. She pressed send and tabbed out, looking at other places of work. She wasn’t too worried about finding another job, she had only been working at The Magnus Institute for about three years, but that was good enough. 

About two hours of searching and sending out a few job applications had her somewhat stumped though. Nothing really showed up that was close enough to her flat. She sighed and leaned back in the chair tiredly, before her email notification pinged softly. 

She opened her email and looked over a very well-worded letter from the official military science branch of the Dwendalian Empire. Her eyes widened as she read it over again. A job as a personal assistant, scheduling meetings, significant vacations, dental coverage… 

Cammie was typing faster than she had ever typed before, ready to accept the position immediately. She had been submitting requests to work as a personal assistant to someone in The Empire for a while now, mostly because she always had a passion for government. She always had a knack for scheduling and filing stuff, and working with people was a comfortable specialty of hers, and she had been aiming for a job in government for several years. 

She didn’t notice at all when a scruffy looking man with dark red hair walked into the building, and stood patiently in front of her desk. 

“Oh?” She said with a bit of a jump in her seat. She had been a bit jumpy since the…… plant incident. 

“Sorry.” She said as she handed him the sign-in clipboard over the desk, and he nodded and took hold of the pen to start writing. “It’s just been… a bit of a rough week.” 

“Ah. That’s unfortunate.” The man replied, in a thick Zemnian accent. His long hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail, but there were still a few strands in the front that escaped the hair tie, so his face wasn’t completely unobscured. His long coat seemed out of place this time of year, especially because Cammie had noted that it was a particularly hot day, but he didn’t seem to be bothered by it. For a man that looked rather unkempt, he smelled good. Like ashes on the wind. She knew of some very expensive soaps with that fragrance, but given how messy his hair looked even when pulled back, she found it rather hard to believe he was the kind of man who bothered with that sort of thing. 

“I hope it looks up for you.” He said, his voice rather sincere as he wrote his reason for coming to the Institute. Checking out a few books, recording a statement, and meeting with The Gentleman. Huh. Cammie rarely saw him get more than one meeting from someone outside the institute in a month, much less two within three days. She was suddenly a bit more on guard with this strange man. 

“The library doesn’t do book checkouts except for some very special cases.” She said, just to make sure the policy was well known. “If you’d like to schedule reading time, I can talk with the head of our library, but we usually only allow patrons or students to read from the library.” She said with a half-smile, knowing that this man, like many who came to the institute in search of reading material, would likely be disappointed. 

“I know it’s a stupid policy, it’s just that many of our more esotoric volumes are one-of-a-kind, and we’re very careful about who we let read them, namely because they are very valuble.” She said, having gone through this speech many times. 

The man, who had written down Caleb Widogast on the sign-in sheet, nodded in understanding. “Hm. Well, perhaps The Gentleman will make an exception when I talk to him.” He said, shrugging as he walked towards the door to the archives, waving slightly over his shoulder. 

It was then that she noticed the cat that was following him. It was a ginger tabby that padded alongside him, which she hadn’t been able to see from over her desk. It didn’t have a collar, or leash, or harness or anything. It just followed him. Must have been a well trained cat. 

That was…… fine. Someone came in to make a statement, and he seemed mostly normal, aside from the cat. 

Cammie smiled to herself. Maybe things were looking up for her after all. 

Caleb Widogast descended into the archives with his hands in his pockets, completely ignoring the people around him. It was what he usually did, just with a book in hand. His walk to the statement room was a pensieve one. 

He wondered how many of these statements he featured in. He certainly had caused a great deal of people a lot of pain and suffering, even if most of that was many years ago. Nowadays, he preferred to feed that which fed him in subtler ways. Or ways that left people too dead to give a statement. 

As he put the tape in the recorder and sat down at the table, he looked at the ceiling with a sigh. He had been involved in the truth of the world, the truth with strange powers and ravenous monsters, since he was very young, so he could feel the watching that characterized this place. This place certainly was a stronghold of Beholding if he had ever been in one. 

Frumpkin jumped on the table and he smiled, stroking the cats head as he put the recorder down on the table, thoughtfully running his fingers through the ginger tabby’s soft fur. He pressed play and thought for a second, before speaking clearly and calmly in his even Zemnian accent.

“Statement of Caleb Widogast. Regarding my experiences with The Blackened Earth. Statement begins. 

I can’t remember a time when The Blackened Earth wasn’t a part of my soul. I’ve had more than one debate with myself about whether or not I was ever even human to begin with, but I think I was. All I know is that Trent Ikithoin orchestrated my turn to The Desolation from the very beginning. 

I had a… knack for fire from when I was very young. My parents never saw it for how dangerous it really was, but when I managed to start a fire in the living room while playing when I was four with a match and piece of paper, I think they knew I was not an ordinary child. Back then though, the fires I started never really hurt anyone, I had not discovered that fixation yet. 

My parents wanted me to keep my gifts secret. They were very poor, and I’m assuming that they figured that if people found out about them, they would try to take me, or use my gifts for their own advantage. They were right, but I assume they were thinking of things in a more X-men sense than what actually ended up happening. 

So I did keep things secret, and I avoided hurting anyone, even if I always had the small urge to set buildings ablaze with people inside them, or to destroy things that held value, or even to… experience the sensation of burning flesh. 

The latter was what caused me to truly realize that there was something very different about me. I found that whenever I put fire to my skin, it didn’t burn, or even hurt… it just… melted. Like wax. Once, when I was ten, I made a makeshift pyre in the woods behind my parent’s house and set the whole thing ablaze. I’m glad I brought a change of clothes, because what I was wearing was burned to cinders. I was fine though. The fires I started were explainable, because there was always something nearby to start them with. My inability to burn however, was not. 

Aside from that, I was a fairly ordinary child. I liked to burn things, the largest being abandoned buildings or sections of dead forest, but other than that I was a fairly normal child. I liked to read a lot, especially things that hinted at the esoteric nature of the world that I wanted so badly to discover. It was all fable and fiction, but it still excited me. 

In the end, I was selected to go to a very high-level and fancy private secondary school on the basis of my test scores, which, were admittedly very high so I can’t quite blame my parents for buying into the lie. Still, when Trent Ikithion was sitting in my kitchen talking to my parents one day when I got home from school, it did come as a bit of a shock to me that my normally very protective parents were willing to let me go halfway across the country for school. Looking back though… It makes too much sense. 

In the car on the way there, I knew why I was really getting into this special school, when Trent pulled a lighter from his back pocket and set a fire in the palm of his hand. I recall being surprised that it didn’t seem to melt like wax, but it was still relieving, to see someone who I thought was like me. 

I told him everything. I told him more than I told my own parents in that one conversation. It was the way he looked at me I think. Like he wouldn’t judge me for anything I said, felt or did. So I told him not only about how easily I set fires, but how I wanted to set fire to everything that mattered to people. He understood me. He understood me so much that when we got back to the school, which was actually a legitimate boarding school filled with ordinary students, he told me that the driver was a criminal that the Dwendalian Empire wanted dead. I didn’t even think twice, I took the lighter he gave me and burned the man alive on the spot. 

It was such a glorious rapture, hearing the man scream in agony. His skin cracked and blistered, and I distinctly remembered watching in fascination long after he stopped moving. 

He certainly wasn’t the last. 

I took my lessons at school and excelled. I wasn’t the only acolyte of the Desolation there though, Trent had found two other candidates that were seemingly well suited to The Lightless Flame. Admittedly, I was a little proud of the fact that I was more well suited to it than they were. 

The other two, Astrid and Eodwulf, were juvenile delinquents with a long history of arson. I got on surprisingly well with them, and we were all fast friends. Trent seemed to know that The Desolation favored me a bit more, and his tutelage was helpful. I learned about the other entities, and the truth of the world. Trent told me that this was all in service of setting the world ablaze for The Blackened Earth, and I had no reason to doubt him. 

I also grew fond of immolation. At first, Trent just told me that whoever I was to send up in flames was a bad person. After six months, he didn’t need to, because I didn’t care. I craved those nourishing screams of those who I set ablaze. 

I always managed to put on a good face for my parents though. When I went back to see them for holidays and over the summers, they couldn’t really see anything different about me. The only difference was the increase in fires over the times I spent with them. I think they ignored that because they hoped it wasn’t me. 

By the time I was 17, I was ready to undergo what Trent called ascension. I didn’t know what it was, but I was excited for it. Burning down an office building full of people? A pyre with several people burning to death with me in the middle of it? Maybe a volcanic eruption or wildfire? I was ready, until I was told exactly what I had to do. 

Astrid and Eodwulf were perfectly comfortable burning their parents alive, but I don’t think they really ever cared about their families. They hadn’t seen their parents for a long time, but I cared a lot. 

It took a lot of convincing. In the end, the promise that it was all to set the world ablaze for The Blackened Earth, that was enough to convince me to set the world ablaze. So, I took a can of gas and that lighter Trent had given me all those years ago, and I covered my parents house in gasoline, and dumped some of it over my head for good measure. 

I didn’t think my parents would wake up when I ignited the lighter. 

I’ll never forget the looks of agony on their faces as all I had ever known and the only people who ever loved me opened the door as I set the house ablaze. I had seen so many people burn alive, but this was different. The way their flesh blistered as mine dripped from my body, I fell to my knees and wailed. I knew exactly what I had done, and that there was no going back. I had never experienced such a sense of loss and pain, and it sent me into complete and utter brokenness for 15 years. 

I don’t know how I got into that asylum, but I know I hated it. I think Trent put me there because it was particularly uncomfortable. A subtle reminder that I completely and utterly failed him. That I would never be there for his plan to blacken the Earth and blister it’s people. It helped that, after killing my parents, I had a habit of burning people with my touch whenever I thought about my parents. No one in that Asylum cared enough to help me off the ground when I was sobbing or numb from my own sadness. 

In the end, I snapped out of it when Frumpkin managed to find his way into my room one lonely night. I think that this cat was sent by The Desolation. It could be because he’s never been harmed by the fires I’ve set, maybe it’s because I never had to train him to follow me or to do what I tell him to, but I think it was because the second I touched him, a second when I very much was thinking of my parents, the cat was perfectly fine. It cuddled up to me even. And in that moment, everything became much clearer to me. 

Trent never set a fire in his palm, and I suddenly remembered how he always watched the fires of his students from a very safe distance away. For a man who claimed to serve the Lightless Flame, he was awfully squeamish about fire. Then, everything fell into place. How he convinced my parents, how he never had a shortage of people for me to burn alive, that slimy man had been of The Spider the whole time. 

He was an ambitious spider, I give him that. Looking to manipulate the greatest enemy of his patron into his own personal weapons. I know that he got at least two with Astrid and Eodwulf, and probably, with the success there, many more. 

I think the reason it didn’t quite work for me was because I was chosen by The Desolation from the beginning. The others were never really chosen by The Desolation, they were just pyromaniacs. They took fairly well to The Lightless Flame, but I think The Lightless Flame chose me from the beginning. The others gained bodies of wax, but my flesh had always been somewhere in between. I was too tied to The Desolation for The Web to fully control me. 

Ultimately though, what I did gave me more power than I could have ever hoped for. The pain and loss I experienced in the moment of my transformation did something to me that I haven’t seen in other avatars of the desolation. It wasn’t hard at all for me to escape the Asylum at that point, but I still found it hard to use my gifts. I still felt so guilty for what I did, and I didn’t really want to remember what I had done. 

I escaped though, it’s not hard to throw a chair through a window. The glass should have been thicker, but again, it wasn’t exactly an asylum with much of a budget. 

Eventually, I met Nott, and then the rest of our little group soon after. It was kind of funny, how we could all be tied to different entities and get along. Back then, I protected myself with a few strange and powerful books that held the powers of different entities that I kept in handy belts under my coat. I still didn’t want to use my abilities, because those memories haunted me. 

When backed into a corner though, who we are truly does come out. That, and pure, fiery rage. At that point, I didn’t really even want to go after Trent, I was still afraid of him. Then, we crossed paths with some particularly nasty human traffickers who were in service of a few different entities, and my handy books were doing little for me there. 

Their leader, a nasty man named Lorenzo, likely would have been able to kill all of us if I hadn’t decided to embrace the fire in my heart. He mentioned how he enjoyed the tips he had received from Trent Ikithion, and I knew from that point on, that everyone standing in the way of my revenge would burn to cinders. His last moments were spent in fire and agony, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt quite so… satisfied. Since then, my strength in the flame continues to grow, and I savor every moment of it. 

I still miss my parents. I dream about them sometimes, in between dreams of how I will make Trent Ikithion suffer. He tried to play with The Lightless Flame, and I cannot wait for my opportunity to show him what happens when you play with fire. 

Statement ends.” 

Caleb leaned back in the chair, breathing a sigh of relief as he closed his eyes and let the final tears fall from his eyes. He felt oddly free, like telling the entire story had freed him of a portion of the burden he felt. After a few moments, he got up and walked out of the room, heading up for his meeting with The Gentleman. 

About an hour later, Cammie was walking up to her boss’s office with a stack of papers, mostly just old sign-in forms and financial records, along with her letter of resignation. She breathed out. This was it. The rest of the week, and then she was free to pursue her dream job somewhere else. 

She knocked on the door and waited for about a minute. 

She knocked again. 

And again. 

Nothing. 

She sighed and looked at her phone. He was supposed to be in his office, there was no way that he had just left. The Gentleman never left work early for no reason, and he always told her. 

She opened the door and stepped inside, just intending to leave the papers on his desk. Everything looked normal, organized well and with the creepy plant sitting on a corner of his desk. Apparently with the flowers cut off and growing again, much quicker than they probably should have. Maybe he had made that tea. It didn’t matter. She was leaving, getting out of this creepy place, she would ignore the weird plant and just put things on his desk. 

As she walked to his desk, she noticed how one of the bookshelves was… ajar. Like a door, it was swung open just slightly, with light coming from the room beyond. She put the papers on his desk and stared for a second. She should have just walked out. She knew she wasn’t going to like what she saw, this place was too weird and creepy. 

She didn’t know why she crept closer to look into the room. Perhaps it was the thought of figuring out what was going on, gaining some previously unknown knowledge about this place. 

As she looked into the room, she wasn’t immediately surprised. It was another room full of books, organized as well as the office, even if it was a bit bigger. The Gentleman stood, leaning against another desk that was much more bare, with very little on it. He was sipping crimson colored tea from a transparent mug, watching something in front of him. 

She adjusted her view and her eyes widened. She saw a woman, short and blonde, tied to a chair and seething at The Gentleman. She was wearing the uniform of a police officer, and if looks could kill, The Gentleman would be buried six feet underground. 

“You bastard.” She spat at him. “You know you won’t get the stone from me. I swallowed it. And by the time you figure a way to get it out of me, I’m sure that the rest of my unit will have found me.” 

“Yes, the regeneration factor of some hunters can prove… problematic.” The Gentleman said as he took another sip of tea. “I’m still a bit perplexed at why you sided with The People’s Church and agreed to try and take their Darkstone from an Avatar of the Buried, but I suppose blackmail goes a long way, doesn’t it?” He said calmly. She only growled at him and seemed to struggle against her bindings. 

“Unfortunately for you, I’ve already figured out a way to get the stone out and locked up in a vault, and to dispose of what’s left of you.” He said, his voice as even and calm as ever. 

“Fuck you. You’re bluffing.” She spat back. Cammie noticed how sharp her teeth were when she snarled at The Gentleman, who seemed unfazed. 

“I’d like to introduce you to Caleb Widogast.” He said with a smirk, and a look behind her. 

Cammie shifted slightly to see Caleb walking to the side of the hunter, his coat sleeves rolled up to reveal that his veins were glowing with a burning reddish orange, like molten magma. 

Cammie’s eyes widened as he looked to the gentleman and then stepped towards her, almost casually, but his burning eyes betrayed far more sinister intentions. 

“The office isn’t completely soundproofed, but I trust you will be able to handle that, Mr. Widogast?” The Gentleman asked with a raise of his eyebrows. 

Caleb nodded and this Hunter’s eyes opened wide. She opened her mouth to scream, but it seemed that Caleb had been waiting for that. He put his hand into her mouth, and knelt as she writhed in pain. He closed his eyes, as if he was savoring the feeling of her tongue being reduced to shapeless, boiling liquid. 

Cammie covered her mouth and resisted the urge to gag. The stench was enough, but the sounds that this woman was making, her voice box not quite destroyed, but her mouth firmly seared shut, made her want to vomit. The gurgling and hoarse groans of pain were probably the worst part, knowing that she was still quite alive as Caleb pressed a hand to her lower stomach and got to work. 

It took about a minute for her flesh to melt to the point that he could get his hand into her body. After some adjusting and several minutes of her shaking and writhing, and the continuation of those awful noises, he triumphantly pulled his hand out of her chest to reveal a sparkling black gemstone, which he held up to the light to examine.

“Unless she made a hobby of eating black stones, I believe this is it?” He said calmly to The Gentleman. He looked back down at what was left of The Hunter, who’s torso looked more like a molten crater now, and who was very definitely dead. 

The Gentleman nodded, and Caleb put it on the desk with a sharp CLACK. 

“Thank you very much Caleb, I would have been in quite a spot of trouble if I had been forced to try and get rid of her and dispose of her body myself. Now… well, I have paid the garbage men at the institute to not ask questions about the kinds of things we dispose of and to send them straight to the incinerator, so I trust that things will be fine.” He said calmly as he and Caleb began to walk back towards the office. Cammie was gone, very quickly. She ran out of there as quickly and silently as she could, attempting to shut the door quietly. She had seen enough. 

She didn’t stop moving until she reached her flat, where she promptly vomited into her toilet for about thirty minutes. She was sobbing as well, mostly because she realized she was working for a murderer. And had seen a murder. This was wrong. This was all so wrong. 

She sighed and looked in the mirror after she was (mostly) done crying and throwing up. She breathed in and told herself that she would be fine. “One more day Cammie. One more day and you never have to work for this creepy fucking archive ever again. In one day, you’ll be working as a personal assistant to Mr. Ikithion with 50 Vacation days and a nice paycheck of 75 thousand Euros a year. You can do this. Just one more day.” She said as she breathed in and walked to bed. She needed a thousand vacation days after this, but if she could get through it, she could leave this whole thing alone. 

Back at the Institute, as Caleb and The Gentleman walked back into the office, Caleb looked at the barely ajar door of the office with a puzzled glance. Someone had been through there. He opened his mouth to say something to The Gentleman as he pulled his sleeve back down, but the man was already speaking. 

“It seems our receptionist has become aware of more than intended.” He said with a sigh as he looked at the resignation letter on the desk. 

“That’s unfortunate.” Caleb said as he straightened out his coat. “She could be telling someone about this whole thing as we speak.” He said with a sigh. “Hopefully she didn’t see anything.” 

The Gentleman shook his head and took another drink of tea. “No, she saw what was happening.” As Caleb gave him a puzzled look, he smirked. “Eyes everywhere, remember?” He replied. “I wouldn’t worry. She’s not going to be talking about it with anyone. I know that for a fact. Thank Mr. Clay for the plant for me, will you?” He said as he waved Caleb goodbye. 

Caleb took the hint and walked out, nodding slightly as he walked into the library to grab a few volumes that The Gentleman had offered him in exchange for his services. It was always a good deal to get some more books, especially ones about The Spider. After about an hour he ventured into the cold evening streets of Rexxentrum carrying several old volumes, where the cold cut through his coat rather easily, but never quite broke his internal heat. 

The Gentleman sat down in his chair and sighed, placing his mug of blood red tea next to the plant, which was growing its flowers back rather quickly. He opened his computer and began typing, looking for a new receptionist.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Warnings: GORE, Arson, Fire, and Burning Alive.
> 
> Well, As always, comments and messages on both AO3 or (Preferably) my tumblr will make me update faster, because they get my ADHD looking-ass brain to actually think about shit more, so send me comments if you want the cliffhanger to be resolved quicker. Also, this fast update was absolutely inspired by the response to the last chapter, so thank you all for the lovely messages and comments. Take care!


	8. Statement of: Fjord

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Statement of Fjord, regarding his life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All good things must come to an end.
> 
> (Content warnings in the end)

Thunder rumbled ominously as Cammie drummed her fingers on her desk nervously. One hour and she was free from this creepy place. She could leave The Magnus Archives as just another place on her resume, and she wouldn’t ever have to think about it again. 

She knew far more than she wanted to. If she had seen someone get shot, or choked, or stabbed, she could go to the police. Who was she supposed to call when a man burned someone's tongue to ashes with his bare hands? 

She wasn’t able to live in denial anymore, she couldn’t maintain that blissful ignorance anymore. These people that Beauregard was involved with? They weren’t normal. 

Every passing face made her jump. The tiefling that came out of the janitors closet, the goblin woman covered in dust, the empty, pale woman who never said a word to her, the stranger that looked like Lucien, she knew that something was off with all of them, but as of the last couple of days? The pink haired firbolg with the beautiful plant and the red haired man with the ginger cat? They wouldn’t have been that abnormal to her. She wouldn’t have remembered them on a regular day, save for the blood flowers and molten veins. 

Anyone could be something far darker. 

So she kept her eyes peeled for anything out of the ordinary. Odd hair colors, bringing pets in, shifty glances, anything. On the busy Friday, however, everyone seemed strange, and after about 20 people she couldn’t really see anyone abnormal. 

At about two thirty, a half-orc man who was quite tall and well built, and rather handsome in a rugged sort of way walked in, his scarf billowing in the wind. The storm outside was a howling gale, not much rain, but a lot of thunder, lightning and wind. Dry static was in the air as hair stood on end, and everyone was clamouring to get indoors. 

He had windswept brown hair and light brown eyes, almost amber in color, and he walked at a brisk pace. Among the group of students walking into the archive who signed the sheet, there was a single name added to the directory, with a one word reason for visitation, which she didn’t really pay attention to as she tore the sheet off the clipboard and add another to it so the remaining two students could sign in. 

Fjord. Statement. 

He walked through the archives with his back straight and his jaw set. He didn’t like the feeling of being watched here, which was seemingly omnipresent in this building. He was far too acquainted with that feeling. 

As he sat down at the table to give a statement, he grit his teeth. He could feel the watching, the way his skin prickled with the gaze of a thousand invisible eyes. He clenched his fist and put the tape into the recorder, preparing to speak, when his phone pinged. 

“It’s The Gentleman.” From Beau. “He wants to talk.” 

“After the statement.” He replied quickly. “Then I’ll pay him a visit.” 

He slipped the phone into his pocket and sighed, before hitting play on the tape recorder. 

“Statement of Fjord. Regarding my life. Statement recorded live from subject.” 

He took a deep breath. This place was no sanctuary to him, every circular mark of brick or stone in the basement took the shape of a thousand eyes, boring their way into his skin like flesh eating worms. Given his experiences with his friends, he would take the worms over the eyes. The worms bored through flesh, but the eyes? They formed their tunnels through the mind and soul. They bored and tunneled and dug in until his skin was on inside out and he felt so incredibly exposed. He knew he was safe. He knew those eyes couldn’t navigate the moat around what was left of his mind, but he knew. He knew that if it had the chance? He knew that the eye, in all of it’s ceaseless watching, would unravel his mind and bind him in the threads of knowledge and memory, unraveling him until there was nothing left but sinewy rope, like tape to be placed in a player to be rewound and replayed for sick, voyeuristic thrill. 

“Statement begins.” He said with a deep intake of breath. 

“I don’t think I’ve ever been in a physical location quite like my nightmares, but this archive comes close. I don’t think Vandren knew what he was doing when he gave me that chain. 

I should start from the beginning. I was no one, and I think that with all that has happened to me, that is where I was safest. Scrounging out a living at a shitty orphanage in Port Dumali might have been awful, but it was safe. 

Now? Now safety is a luxury that I haven’t experienced in many years. 

I don’t know if I would change anything though, to trade safety for a life of meaning something. Then again, as I look back, the only choice I ever had, the only choice that I ever felt truly free to make for myself, it wasn’t the choice to work on Vandran’s ship as a dockhand. I was hungry and young, the other kids in the orphanage were beating me to the point where I wasn’t able to take it anymore, and I don’t think I would have survived to be anything other than a street rat. 

Vandren was a strange man. Tall, late fifties, white hair, and always wore this silver chain around his neck that had a sort of pattern that everyone knew was intricate, but could never figure out what it actually was. 

He had one spot left on his ship, and when you work in the kind of artifact hauling that Vandren did, you want someone who’s strong and who can blend in. A chubby half-orc orphan was hardly a popular choice. 

So I was put on cargo duty, which I thought I was given because it was easy grunt work. As it turns out, there was a reason Vandren usually picked up an extra couple of shiphands before a big cargo haul. In this particular cargo haul was a painting of an actor who was putting a mask on, in the middle of a theater where everyone was bleeding profusely from their faces. The actor’s features were obscured from the point of view in the painting, blocked by the grotesquely human mask he was pulling onto his face. I remember it vividly. I remember the other shiphand that Vandren had hired, Reginald, had uncovered the painting despite me saying that it probably wasn’t wise, after red liquid had begun to drip from it’s frame. 

It was a normal few days after that, although everyone seemed to notice that there always seemed to be someone walking away, out of the corner of their eye. I asked Vandren, and I played a hunch. I asked him if it was because Reginald had uncovered the painting. He looked at me approvingly and told me, 

“The faceless men seek to wear what they do not have.” 

It seemed to be obvious, after he pointed it out. I realized that the person who was always in the corner of my eye when I looked over the crew didn’t have any visible features. I think that thing would have picked a few of us off if I hadn’t locked Reginald in the room with the painting that night while we were on duty. When I covered the painting in the morning, the mask that the actor was donning looked an awful lot like Reginald’s face. I didn’t check for him in the audience when I covered the painting again. 

After that, the crew of The Tide’s Breath respected me a lot more. Things were weird, on that ship, but I felt like I belonged. Especially when the crew started teaching me things. How to shoot, how to fight, how to survive. I took to it better than most would have thought, but I think everyone knew that I was always best at being the face. I was good at talking to people, bargaining, deceiving, that sort of thing. I ended up keeping the job looking after the cargo, and I was pretty good at it. Given that we were a cargo ship, that made me just about second in command to Vandren, and almost no one had an issue with that. With the nature of the cargo, most everyone seemed okay with me handling it. Vandren certainly never had any complaints. 

Vandren never liked talking to people, and he spent a lot of time alone in his quarters. However, after a few round trips and about a year on the ship, I realized that at night, he liked to wander the decks. He usually walked away whenever anyone got close, but he never seemed to mind when I was around. He said that he knew that during those nightly wanderings on the decks at sea, I felt the same thing he did. I said that I agreed, but looking back, I know otherwise. 

Vandren liked the silence and the solitude of the decks at night. I thought I did too, but in the end I ended up staring at that line between the ocean and the sky, the great horizon. The ocean spread out infinitely below my feet, until it was far out enough to be consumed by the sky and the great stars above. It was comforting, and oh so beautiful to me. Knowing that we’re simply spinning away among the dusting of stars inside the universe made me feel…… content, with the fact that I was nobody, who came from nothing. 

Of course, good things always have to come to an end. The end for me, of course, was when I nearly met The End. I said before that almost no one had an issue with me being second to Vandren. The emphasis there is on almost, as one person did have an issue. Sabien. He was related to Vandren I think, and on the ship a lot longer than I was. He did not like how close Vandren and I were, I think that he had always seen Vandren as a father figure, but when I came along and Vandren became more of a father to me than he was to Sabien, that made Sabien very angry. Of course, the self-righteous bastard had his own parents, and he certainly didn’t need another. 

I had seen it coming from the beginning, but I never told Vandren about my suspicions because I wanted to give Sabien the benefit of the doubt. When I walked on him holding that mask though, arming a plastic explosive? I knew I had made a fatal mistake. I shot at him, of course, but it wasn’t like it was hard for him to blend into the darkness. He left with five parting words. 

“I do not know you.” 

By the time I had ran to Vandren to let him know, the first explosion had gone off. With the ship sinking around us, he took off his chain, and he pressed it into my hand.

“I don’t know if you’ll be safe from this, but I know you’ll be able to keep it safe from prying eyes.” 

His words were always cryptic, but those words took me years to figure out. I had always accepted the presence of the supernatural, but everything existed at a sort of distance until that night. I always had the ability to close the shipping crate, and all the supernatural shit would cease. It wasn’t a part of me yet. I could have walked away. 

Instead, when that second explosion threw me into the depths below, it was suddenly much, much closer. I think I almost died, before I washed up onshore. I don’t remember how I got on the beach, but I remember the dreams. 

Tendrils, emerging from the deep. Tendrils covered in eyes. Massive eyes watching me. The tendrils snaked up around me and they watched, and watched, and watched. Words came from the silence beyond the eyes. Observe. Learn. Behold. Consume.

When I woke up, I noticed the pattern that the chain was spun in. It was a string of eyes. At the end of the chain, there was a small, amber stone with a black slit in the middle. It looked remarkably like an eye. 

I wandered for a short time after that, and my dreams were hardly all that uncomfortable. I met Jester, then Beauregard, then the others, and everything seemed to be somewhat normal for me. I still had the dreams, but they hadn’t yet become nightmares. 

We had been travelling together for about a year when we met Avantika. We had stolen a ship after a drastically botched investigation of some mystic artifacts, and she had come to us after a vision had guided her. She had known Vandren, back when they were both in service of the same god. The Eye beneath the seas. The Many-Eyed Serpent. The Eternal Watcher. Vandren had escaped, and she had tried to kill him for it, but she mentioned that she had never been able to find him amongst the fog of his practiced isolation. 

Avantika was beautiful and charming. She was an elven woman, with strong features and light brown skin, and she also took a lot after Vandren. She probably had learned a lot about being a captain from him. This had all been after Caleb embraced his power, and she was certainly happy to accept several avatars into her crew, along with me and my pendant. 

I didn’t feel safe around her. I couldn’t lie to her, she would just give me that stare, and I knew that she was piercing me with her gaze. In the end, I ended up giving her more than I wanted to. She couldn’t take the chain from me after Vandren had entrusted it to me, but she had the knife for the ritual. The Sea of Eyes, she called it. 

I slept with her, several times whilst we were searching for the location to enact her ritual. She had more than one ship at her disposal, and when we found the underwater temple, she wanted to enact the ritual. 

In those months on her ship though, I felt…… more and more uneasy. Vandren had fled, and he told me to protect the chain, but the closer we got, the more I knew that he wouldn’t have wanted this. There was a reason that he escaped to the Lonely, and The Eye wasn’t going to let me do the same. 

My days were fine. Piracy on the high seas really isn’t bad when you’ve got a big crew, hell, half a fleet, and the Captain wants you to cooperate. Her first mate, Vera, didn't like me very much, but it didn’t matter. Ironic that her second mate, Ipess, liked me a lot. It really wasn’t so bad, the crew treated me well enough. 

My nights were filled with memories of gazing, piercing eyes and tendrils that ripped me apart. They dragged me into the great sea, and they held me so that I could be beheld for all eternity. One word phrases boomed out from the crushing depths. Punish. Rage. Behold. Consume.

When we finally found the temple, we had been searching for about two months, and we came upon a small, uncharted island in the Lucidean ocean. The island was a small circular landmass shaped like… well, it’s on the nose, but it was shaped like an eye. 

I was uneasy, but when we swam below the depths, I felt strangely…… safe. In the way that I had on the deck of Vandren’s ship, like the great ocean could hold all my worries and sorrows. 

When we were inside the temple, we all slept, the day before the ritual was to take place. I remember the dream I had that night unlike any other. I was under the water once again, but this time, before the eyes could pull me back to their embrace, instead, I saw flickering lights in the distance. I fought to see them, swimming harder than I had ever swam before. I only broke the surface for a moment, but I saw it. A sky full of stars. 

The tendrils with the eyes reached into my stomach when they pulled me back down to the depths. When I awoke, I coughed up blood. And an eyeball. 

Avantika thought it was a sign. I knew it was a warning. 

I was never going to be able to leave it’s gaze. 

We were alone in the ritual chamber that night. My friends are powerful, but they cannot trespass where they are unwanted. I think Beau might have been able to, given that her patron is the same as Avantika’s, but Beau’s relationship with The Eye is different. She is supposed to chronicle, whereas Avantika was meant to see. 

There was an altar in the center of that underwater temple, an altar with a divet meant to hold my pendant, with a pool of water behind it, a deep, black pool of water where nothing could have possibly penetrated. It was a cavernous, encompassing pool, like a cavernous maw to another universe. When I placed my pendant on the altar however, that was when the eyes started to pierce the dark of that pool. One by one, they blinked into being in the darkness, and I stepped back. The underwater temple was shaking and collapsing as the seals were being shaken, but Avantika still had to do her part. As Avantika was meant to embed the ritual knife into the Eye, as I was abandoning all hope, I saw something in that inky black pool. 

Just for a moment, in that darkness, a star shone it’s light into my eye. I was shot back to those nights on the many ships I’ve sailed over my lifetime, the nights spent looking up at the sky, at the stars, in all their vast, incredible resonance. I was normally but a particle of plankton in the vast ocean of the universe, being propelled along by the currents of a greater being. At that moment though, I knew that that whole ocean, it was holding its breath. It was waiting for my choice. 

I stepped forward to embrace Avantika. I think she thought it was a moment of affection that she thought I had for her. I have never known such righteous fury and exuberant bliss as when I pushed her head into the inky black pool and drowned her. 

This was not her temple. Her and her filthy eye were not welcome in the vast depths of the sea that I loved so much. All of that great eye’s machination, all of the mental torture and the nightmares, all of the duress she put me under, all of the panicked affection I faked to keep my friends safe, it was all drowned in that moment of righteous fury. She struggled and slashed at my arms, but I held her there, slamming her head into the jagged stone and holding her under those inky depths until I was sure that she would never move again. 

I tossed her body to the side and I’m not ashamed to admit that I cried. I wailed in despair at how unfair everything was. It all was just so fucking unfair that I was born to parents who threw me onto the streets in a shitty orphanage, only to get a tiny portion of fufilment with Vandren, and then to have it ripped away from me, to find new friends, even with their esoteric eccentricities, to then have to enter into a hell of paranoia and toxicity to try and protect them and then have them ripped away from me again. I wailed my anger out to everything that had hurt me. The streets of Port Dumali, the orphanage, my childhood bullies, Sabien, Avantika, The Ceaseless Watcher, The Entire Fucking World. I wailed my pain to the sea and the stars as it consumed me. 

When I opened my eyes, I was lying naked on a beach, staring up at the stars. I don’t know how long I laid there in the pure ecstasy of what I had become. 

I died. I survived. 

And I couldn’t feel the fear anymore. 

When I did get up though, it was because Vera was screaming at me. I probably should have figured that an acolyte of The Eye would have a way to watch, and to confer that knowledge. 

A storm was brewing in the night, and I was standing, naked, in front of an armada of two thousand men with guns trained on me. My friends were tied up beside me on the beach, beaten and bloody. I think that’s what snapped me out of it. The anger. 

I looked forward, and still, all I could see was the sea, the sky, and the clouds that outlined the brightness of the stars. 

I remember Ipess because he shot at me. The second the bullet crashed into the sand beside me, my eyes flicked to him and the heavens were alight with lightning. 

He was nothing but smoldering ash a second later. I think it was at that moment that Vera knew how badly she had chosen. When an Avatar is born, there is a great movement of power, and a great hunger. I believe it was The Eye that said it best to me in my dreams. 

Consume.

I think that Vera knew at that point how badly she had chosen. She had thousands of men and several ships. Ships that sailed on the ocean below the horizon, which was so, so willing to take back what belonged to it. 

The clouds coalesced and the ocean churned and the sky compressed and the stars brightened as I allowed The Unending Depths to flow through me. Caleb says that my eyes were as bright as any star in the sky as The Vast flowed from my body in an expression of pure destruction that impressed even him. Was it to protect my friends? For revenge against the Eye? To wipe every trace of Avantika from the Earth? To satiate my new hunger? To give The Vast what it was owed? I don’t know, or particularly care. I just know that at that moment, I’ve never felt more content. 

It was a while before any of my friends talked to me. Their reactions were…… different. Their ascensions were not nearly as dramatic as mine, or they had been avatars for a lot longer. I don’t think I could have stopped the carnage if I wanted to, but I don’t.

Because in the end, as we sailed back, I felt free.” 

Fjord stopped speaking and sighed. He felt like he had just released a large weight from his shoulders. He still didn’t like it here, and the electricity that occasionally jumped between his fingertips echoed his unease, but he didn’t feel nearly as… threatened. 

Maybe The Eye was satisfied. 

He shrugged and put the tape and tape recorder in the box, before putting the box under the table and walking upstairs towards The Gentleman’s office. 

About thirty minutes later, Cammie ascended the stairs to put the sign in sheets in The Gentleman’s mailbox. She felt a sense of triumphant release in getting to leave, which was quickly elbowed aside when the Gentleman opened his office door and said, 

“Oh, thank you Cammie. Bring them in here please.” 

Her stomach sank. She didn’t want to see the inside of that office again, where last time she had nearly thrown up from the violence inside the room. 

But she couldn’t exactly say no. She couldn’t force the words out. 

As she walked in the office and heard the door shut behind her, she knew that she wasn’t leaving. 

“Cammie?” The Gentleman said, in a honeyed tone that in no way concealed the venom in his intent. 

“I’d like you to meet someone.” 

A tall, muscular half-orc stepped out from behind the shadow of the door, looking at her…… nothing. He looked bored. As if this whole scene meant nothing to him. 

She looked back to her previous boss, the tears already beginning to well up in her eyes. “Please. Beau-” 

“Beauregard knows what must be done.” He said, looking as cold and dead as the stone walls of the institute. 

“I won't tell anyone!” She pleaded, the tears flowing freely from her eyes. 

“You won’t have a choice with Ikithion.” He said cooly as he looked at the papers she had just delivered, like this was a common occurrence. Like she was just walking out of his office like she had every Friday for the past three years. 

Fjord stepped forward, and they locked eyes for just a moment. For a second, there was a slight twinge of pain. 

And then she turned to run, and two cold fingers pressed into the back of her neck… 

And she was tumbling up into space, like the floor had disappeared below her. There was no up or down, the stars below and the sea above as she floated in the air for a split second. 

She turned to see The Gentleman and the strange man talking for a second. Their voices seemed far off, something about a debt being repaid, how the powers of Beholding were expected, and no one would see The Vast taking a victim. 

A glimmer of hope. 

And then two words from The Gentleman. Trent. Ikithion. She locked eyes with Fjord again, gazed into those two painfully bright shining stars that they had become. She wondered if starlight tears would fall from starlight eyes. 

Fjord closed his fist, and the room was coated in a spray of blood and gore as the human body was pressurized far beyond its limits. 

“You know, I saw this a week ago after the flowers and the tea.” The Gentleman said as he wiped stray blood from his suit. 

There was silence for a beat. And then the tapping of boots on wooden floors as Fjord took his exit. 

As he walked into the rain, Fjord couldn’t help but look back at the institute. The Eye. He had done terrible things to escape it. Regret wasn’t a familiar feeling to him, and when he closed his eyes he couldn’t quite feel it. He couldn’t feel much at all anymore. 

One of the raindrops from the sky hit his face and slid down his cheek. When it fell onto the ground, it glinted just a bit brighter than all the rest. 

This was just one more statement in blood to add to a very large pile. 

He knew he and his friends would be recording for a very long time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: Gore, and Drowning. 
> 
> There is an epilogue that I will release pretty soon, but this is it! I may do more with the Magnus Nein, but until then, there is this. As always, I love the comments and messages I get about this series. It really does mean a lot to me. Thank you all for reading!


End file.
